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tibrarp  of  'the  theological  ^eroinary 

PRINCETON  •  NEW  JERSEY 

^@8* 

PRESENTED  BY 

Harold  M.  Robinson,  D.D.,  Sec'y. 


i  s/ 

C.  o 


. 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Archive 
in  2019  with  funding  from 
Princeton  Theological  Seminary  Library 


https://archive.org/detaiis/hurnannatureitsre00hock_0 


% 


HUMAN  NATURE  AND 
ITS  REMAKING 


WILLIAM  EENEST  HOCKING 

PROFESSOR  OF  PHILOSOPHY  IN  HARVARD  UNIVERSITY 


New  and  Revised  Edition . 


NEW  HAVEN 

YALE  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 

LONDON  :  HUMPHREY  MILFORD  :  OXFORD  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 

MCMXXIII 


Copyright ,  1918 ,  1923 ,  by  Yale  University  Press. 


First  published ,  May,  1918. 
New  and  Revised  Edition ,  1923. 


TO 

GEORGE  HERBERT  PALMER 

SKILLED  INTERPRETER  OF 
HUMAN  NATURE 
TEACHER  AND  FRIEND 


PREFACE 


SINCE  books  are  no  longer  supposed,  whether  by 
author  or  public,  to  contain  the  final  and  finished 
truth,  no  book  need  apologize  for  being  unripe.  One’s 
hope  is,  not  to  close  discussion,  but  to  open  it.  What 
I  have  here  aimed  to  do  is  the  work  rather  of  the 
quarryman  with  his  blasting  powder  than  of  the 
sculptor  with  his  chisel. 

Not  that  the  quarry  of  human  nature  is  a  new  one. 
But  that  we  are  only  beginning  to  learn  the  technique 
of  dealing  with  the  larger  masses.  Few  of  us,  I  dare 
say,  are  satisfied  with  the  degree  of  clarity  we  have 
reached  about  the  rights  of  the  primitive  impulses, — 
of  the  instincts  of  pugnacity,  sex,  acquisition,  etc., — as 
compared  with  the  claims  of  social  orders  such  as  we 
see  dissolving  before  our  eyes,  or  of  super-social 
orders,  of  art  and  religion.  These  and  other  agencies 
attempt  to  transform  the  original  material  of  human 
nature;  human  nature  resists  the  remaking  process; 
the  groping  effort  of  mutual  adjustment  has  continued 
throughout  the  length  of  history,  has  made  the  chief 
theme  of  history;  we  still  seek  the  broader  principles 
which  govern  the  process,  call  it  what  you  will, — the 
process  of  remaking,  of  educating,  of  civilizing,  of  con¬ 
verting  or  of  saving  the  human  being.  Quest  of  such 
principles  is  the  object  of  this  present  essay. 


Vlll 


PREFACE 


No  doubt,  we  have  always  had  our  authorities  ready 
to  spare  us  the  trouble  of  search,  ready  to  settle  ex 
cathedra  what  human  nature  is  and  ought  to  become. 
And  presumably  we  have  always  had  a  party  of  revolt 
against  authority,  convention,  and  the  like,  in  the  name 
of  what  is  ‘ natural,’ — a  revolt  which  has  commonly 
been  as  dogmatic  and  intuitional  as  the  authority  itself. 

But  the  revolt  of  today  is  no  longer  either  impres¬ 
sionistic  or  sporadic.  It  is  psychological,  economic, 
political: — and  it  is  general.  The  explosive  forces  of 
self-assertion  which  have  finally  burst  their  bounds 
in  the  political  life  of  Central  Europe  have  their  seat 
in  a  widespread  spiritual  rebellion,  a  critical  im¬ 
patience  of  ‘  established ’  sentiments  and  respecta¬ 
bilities,  a  deliberate  philosophic  rejection  not  more  of 
Hague  Conventions  than  of  other  conventions,  a 
drastic  judgment  of  non-reality  upon  the  pieties  of 
Christendom. 

This  rebellion  would  hardly  have  become  so  wide¬ 
spread  or  so  disastrous  if  it  were  wholly  without 
ground.  It  indicates  that  our  moral  idealisms  like  our 
metaphysical  idealisms  have  been  taking  their  task 
too  complacently.  Our  Western  world  has  adhered  to 
standards  with  which  it  has  never  supposed  its  prac¬ 
tice  to  be  in  accord ;  but  heaving  a  resigned  sigh  over 
the  erring  tendencies  of  human  nature,  it  has  offered 
to  these  standards  that  ‘of  course’  variety  of  homage 
which  is  the  beginning  of  mental  and  moral  coma.  By 
labelling  these  standards  ‘ideals’  it  has  rendered  them 
innocuous  while  maintaining  the  profession  of  defer¬ 
ence:  an  ‘ideal’  has  been  taken  as  something  which 


PREFACE 


IX 


everybody  is  expected  to  honor  and  nobody  is  expected 
to  attain. 

It  is  just  these  ideals  that  are  now  violently  chal¬ 
lenged,  and  the  challenge  is  salutary.  It  is  precisely 
the  so-called  Christian  world  which,  having  gone  mor¬ 
ally  to  sleep,  is  now  put  to  a  fight  for  life  with  the  men 
who  persist  in  reducing  their  standards  to  the  level 
of  common  practice,  in  reaching  their  code  of  behavior 
from  below  upward,  not  from  above  downward,  in 
keeping  their  ‘ ideals’  close  to  the  earth  or  at  least  in 
discernible  working  connection  with  the  earth.  Their 
creed  we  may  name  moral  realism;  and  the  craving  for 
an  ingredient  of  moral  realism  in  our  philosophy  seems 
to  me  a  justified  hunger  of  the  age.  The  whole  set  of 
realistic  upheavals,  Nietzscheian,  neo -Machiavellian, 
Syndicalistic,  Freudian,  and  other,  crowd  forward 
with  doctrines  about  human  nature  and  its  destiny 
which  at  least  have  life  in  them.  Whatever  else  they 
contain,  unsound  or  sinister,  they  contain  Thought: 
and  this  thought  must  be  met  on  its  own  ground.  The 
next  step,  whether  in  social  philosophy,  or  in  educa¬ 
tion,  or  in  ethics,  requires  an  understanding  between 
whatever  valid  elements  moral  realism  may  contain 
and  the  valid  elements  of  the  challenged  tradition. 

We  find  our  initial  common  ground  with  this  realism 
by  accepting,  for  the  purposes  of  the  argument,  the 
picture  of  original  human  nature  as  a  group  of 
instincts. 

With  this  starting  joint,  the  usual  realistic  assump¬ 
tion  is  that  human  life  consists  in  trying  to  get  what 


X 


PREFACE 


these  instincts  want.  Mankind’s  persistent  concern 
for  food,  adornment,  property,  mates,  children,  politi¬ 
cal  activity,  etc.,  is  supposed  to  he  explained  by  the 
fact  that  his  instincts  confer  value  on  these  objects. 
By  shaping  our  1  values/  instinct  becomes  the  shaper 
of  life.  And  the  first  and  main  business  of  the  science 
of  living  would  be  to  set  up  an  authentic  and  propor¬ 
tionate  list  of  the  instincts  proper  to  man. 

Then  every  social  order,  every  moral  or  economic 
code,  every  standard  of  living  would  be  judged  by  the 
satisfaction  it  could  promise  to  the  chorus  of  innate 
hungers  and  impulses  thus  revealed. 

This  view  is  simple,  attractive, — and  profoundly  un¬ 
true  to  experience.  The  trouble  is  that  no  one  can  tell 
by  identifying  and  naming  an  instinct  what  will  satisfy 
it.  Certainly  we  cannot  take  the  biological  function 
of  an  instinct  as  a  sufficient  account  of  what  that  in¬ 
stinct  means  to  a  human  being — as  if  hunger  held  the 
conscious  purpose  of  building  the  body,  or  love  were 
an  aim  to  continue  the  species.  The  word  ‘  instinct ’ 
has  no  magic  to  annul  the  obvious  truth  that  satisfac¬ 
tion  is  a  state  of  mind ,  nor  to  evade  the  long  labor  of 
experience  in  determining  what  can  satisfy  a  mind. 
Conscious  life  is  engaged  quite  as  much  in  trying  to 
find  out  what  it  wants  as  in  trying  to  get  it. 

The  truth  is,  instinct  requires  interpretation .  We 
can  set  up  a  usable  measure  of  social  justice  and  the 
like  only  if  we  can  find  something  like  a  true  inter¬ 
pretation  of  instinct,  or  of  the  will  as  a  whole.  In¬ 
stinct  by  itself  has  no  claims,  because  it  has  no  head ; 


PKEEACE 


XI 


it  cannot  so  much  as  say  what  it  wants  except  through 
an  interpreter. 

Our  essay  becomes,  accordingly,  an  experiment  in 
interpretation.  And  there  are  various  agencies  which 
offer  aid  in  the  undertaking.  In  the  person  of  parent, 
pedagog,  lawmaker,  society  stands  ready  to  inform  the 
individual  through  its  discipline,  “This  is  what  you 
want, — not  that,”  and  to  insist  on  his  choosing  the 
alleged  better  part.  All  the  usual  processes  of  train¬ 
ing  or  remaking  purport  to  he  at  the  same  time  works 
of  interpretation :  they  profess  to  bring  to  light  a  ‘real’ 
will,  as  contrasted  with  an  apparent  will,  and  so  to 
introduce  human  nature  to  its  own  meaning. 

But  if  society  (as  not  a  few  of  our  social  philoso¬ 
phers  believe)  is  the  only  or  final  interpreter  of  human 
nature,  human  nature  is  helpless  as  against  society. 
Our  individualisms,  our  democracies,  with  their  brave 
claims  in  behalf  of  the  human  unit,  have  no  case. 
‘ Socialization ’  is  the  last  word  in  human  development; 
and  society  is  always  right. 

If  we  refuse,  as  we  do,  to  accept  this  conclusion,  the 
alternative  is  to  find  some  way,  in  independence  of 
‘ society,’  to  an  objectively  valid  interpretation  of  the 
human  will.  The  case  of  all  liberalism,  of  all  reform, 
of  every  criticism  and  likewise  of  every  defence  of  any 
social  regime,  must  rest  in  the  last  analysis  upon  the 
discovery,  or  the  assumption,  of  such  a  ‘true’  inter¬ 
pretation.  And  my  hope  in  this  essay  is  that  we  may 
chart  the  way  to  it,  and  thus  sketch  the  valid  basis  of 
an  individualistic  theory  of  society. 


Xll 


PREFACE 


We  are  not,  of  course,  presuming  that  mankind  has 
ever,  in  practice,  been  without  such  a  standard.  For 
mankind  has  always  had  a  religion,  and  it  has  been 
one  of  the  historic  functions  of  religion  to  keep  men 
in  mind  of  the  goal  of  their  own  wills.  And  in  so  far 
as  it  has  done  its  work  well,  religion  has  in  fact  set 
men  free  from  the  domination  of  unjust  social  and 
political  constraints.  The  religious  consciousness  has 
apprised  human  nature  of  its  ‘  rights ’ — not  merely  of 
its  claims — and  has  become  the  source  of  whatever  is 
now  solid  in  our  democracies. 

And  even  if  the  social  order  were  perfectly  just  in 
its  arrangements,  freedom  would  still  require  the  ful¬ 
filment  of  this  religious  function.  For  a  man  is  not 
free  unless  he  is  delivered  from  persistent  sidelong 
anxiety  about  his  immediate  effectiveness,  from  servi¬ 
tude  to  an  incalculable  if  not  whimsical  human  flux. 
He  is  free  only  if  he  can  mentally  direct  all  his  work 
to  a  constant  and  absolute  judgment,  address  his  daily 
labor,  if  you  like,  to  God,  build  his  houses  to  God  and 
not  to  men,  write  his  books  to  God,  in  the  State  serve 
his  God  only,  love  his  God  in  the  family,  and  fight 
against  the  (incarnate)  devil  and  the  devil  alone. 
Kepler’s  famous  words  at  the  end  of  his  preface  to 
the  Weltharmonik  are  the  words  of  the  free  man  in 
this  sense: 

Here  I  cast  the  die,  and  write  a  book  to  be  read  whether  by 
contemporaries  or  by  posterity,  I  care  not.  I  can  wait  for 
readers  thousands  of  years,  seeing  that  God  waited  six  thou¬ 
sand  years  for  someone  to  contemplate  his  work. 

An  age  of  competition,  like  our  own,  unless  it  is 


PREFACE 


Xlll 


something  else  than  competitive,  cannot  be  a  free  age, 
however  democratic  in  structure,  because  its  chief 
concerns  are  lateral.  To  the  competitive  elements  in 
our  own  social  order  we  owe  much: — an  impersonal 
estimate  of  worth  in  terms  of  efficiency  which  we  shall 
not  surrender,  a  taste  and  technique  for  severe  self¬ 
measurement,  incredible  finesse  in  the  discrimination 
and  mounting  of  individual  talents.  But  we  owe  to  it 
also  an  over-development  of  the  invidious  comparative 
eye,  a  trend  of  attention  fascinated  by  the  powers, 
perquisites,  and  opinions  of  the  immediate  neighbors. 
The  eternal  standard  is  obscured :  hence  we  do  nothing 
well;  we  lack  sincerity  and  simplicity;  we  are  sus¬ 
picious,  disunited,  flabby;  we  do  not  find  ourselves; 
we  are  not  free.  Unless  we  can  recover  a  working  hold 
on  some  kind  of  religious  innervation,  our  democracy 
will  shortly  contain  little  that  is  worthy  to  survive. 

But  it  is  one  of  the  permanent  achievements  of  our 
time  that  we  recognize  no  antagonism  between  the 
work  of  thought  and  the  voice  of  religious  intuition. 
We  must  perpetually  regain  our  right  to  an  absolute 
object  through  the  labor  of  reflection, — in  our  own 
case,  the  labor  of  interpretation. 

In  the  preparation  of  this  book,  I  have  accumulated 
many  personal  obligations,  quite  apart  from  the 
scientific  debts  acknowledged  at  various  points  in  the 
argument.  And  beside  these,  there  is  an  obligation 
of  a  less  personal  character  though  not  less  real :  that, 
namely,  to  the  liberal  and  heartening  spirit  of  the  Yale 
community.  Those  who  heard  the  lectures  on  which 


XIV 


PREFACE 


these  pages  were  originally  based,  lectures  on  the 
Nathaniel  Taylor  foundation  given  in  1916  before  the 
School  of  Keligion  of  Yale  University,  will  hardly 
recognize  them  in  their  present  form.  But  the  incen¬ 
tive  is  theirs;  and  if  the  idea  has  grown,  I  trust  it  is 
by  way  of  doing  greater  justice  to  the  original  theme. 

W.  E.  H. 


Cambridge ,  March ,  1918. 


NOTE  TO  SECOND  EDITION 

Besetting  of  the  type  for  this  book  gives  a  welcome 
opportunity  to  take  account  of  recent  discussions  of 
the  place  of  instinct  in  human  nature,  of  certain  theo¬ 
retical  aspects  of  the  Freudian  views,  and  of  Professor 
Dewey’s  notable  book  on  Human  Nature  and  Conduct. 
The  changes  made  affect  chiefly  Parts  I,  II  and  IV.  I 
owe  to  the  courtesy  of  the  Journal  of  Abnormal  Psy¬ 
chology  and  Social  Psychology  permission  to  reprint 
(as  Appendix  I)  an  article  on  the  “Conception  of  In¬ 
stinct”  which  appeared  in  1921. 

W.  E.  H. 

Greensboro ,  August ,  1923. 


CONTENTS 


Preface . vii 

PART  I 

% 

ORIENTATION 

Chapter  I.  An  Art  Peculiar  to  Man  ....  3 

Why  human  character  is  and  should  be  an  artificial  product. 

Chapter  II.  The  Emergence  of  Problems  ...  12 

It  is  only  through  much  social  experience  that  the  funda¬ 
mental  problems  of  the  art  of  remaking  human  nature  are 
recognized;  the  experience  of  religion,  of  politics,  of  the 
social  sciences. 

Chapter  III.  On  the  Possibility  of  Changing  Human 

Nature . 15 

Intuition  neither  deceives  nor  settles  the  question  of  freedom 
to  change;  evidence,  structural  and  historic,  of  human  plasti¬ 
city;  legislative  pessimism  and  religious  hopefulness;  why 
experience  fails  to  solve  the  problem. 

Chapter  IV.  What  Changes  are  Desirable?  Libera¬ 
tion  versus  Discipline  .....  22 

Difficulty  of  realizing  ideals  casts  doubt  on  the  ideals;  doubt 
whether  we  know  what  we  want;  liberalism  turns  to  nature 
for  instruction;  the  failure  of  pure  liberalism;  Nietzsche. 

Chapter  V.  The  Liberator  as  Disciplinarian  .  .  31 

Change  of  mind  in  Rousseau  and  in  German  Romanticism; 
why  Hegel’s  work  must  be  done  over,  and  is  being  done  in 
part  by  naturalistic  psychology;  the  element  of  strength  in 
Nietzsche;  present  state  of  the  problem. 


XVI 


CONTEXTS 


Chapter  VI.  An  Independent  Standard  ...  40 

The  logical  possibility  of  being  wholly  just  to  nature,  while 
judging  nature  a  blind  guide.  The  position  of  Plato,  of 
Spinoza,  of  recent  ‘value  theory*;  method  of  our  study. 

PART  II 

THE  NATURAL  MAN 

Chapter  VII.  The  Elements  of  Human  Nature  :  the 

Notion  of  Instinct  .....  49 

The  notion  of  instinct  .  result  of  abstraction;  its  biological 
definition;  its  psychological  side. 

Chapter  VIII.  The  Range  of  Instinct  ...  62 

What  criteria  can  be  used  for  recognizing  instinct?  How  and 
why  observers  differ  as  to  the  amount  of  instinct  to  be 
attributed  to  man. 

Chapter  IX.  Survey  of  the  Human  Equipment  .  .  68 

The  ‘  units  of  behavior  ’ ;  the  existence  of  ‘  general  instincts  * ; 
instincts  of  the  second  order;  ‘central  instincts*;  a  partial 
tabular  view. 

Chapter  X.  The  Central  Instincts:  Necessary  In¬ 
terests  . 80 

The  alleged  instinct  of  curiosity  as  a  problem  in  the  morphol¬ 
ogy  of  instinct;  the  theory  of  central  stimulation  and 
response;  importance  and  difficulty  of  the  central  instincts. 

Chapter  XI.  The  Will  ......  88 

Probability  that  central  instincts  are  not  separable  entities; 
the  will  as  the  identical  element  in  all  value-experience  when 
that  element  becomes  a  ‘stable  policy*;  the  ‘will  to  power* 
as  a  name  less  bad  than  some  others  for  the  general  element 
in  human  wills;  two  Nietzscheian  errors  discarded  at  the 
outset. 


Note  on  Freud 


98 


CONTENTS 


XVII 


Chapter  XII.  Mind  and  Body  :  the  Last  Analysis  .  102 

The  speculative  question  whether  will  can  be  further  ana¬ 
lyzed  ;  ‘  energy  *  as  an  explanatory  conception ;  will  conceived 
in  terms  of  idea  at  work. 

PART  III 
CONSCIENCE 

Chapter  XIII.  The  Interest  in  Justice  .  .  .  Ill 

The  interest  in  justice,  according  to  Aristotle,  is  the  basis 
of  political  life,  and  is  an  exhibition  of  human  nature;  can 
we  admit  an  original  moral  disposition  or  instinct? 

Chapter  XIV.  Conscience  and  the  General  Will  .  115 

Given  sociability  and  a  power  of  generalization,  some  kind 
of  an  ‘  ought *  was  bound  to  emerge ;  but  the  socially  derived 
‘ought*  is  not  identical  with  the  ‘I  ought*  of  experience. 

Chapter  XV.  Conscience  and  Instinct  .  .  .  119 

How  conscience  resembles  an  instinct — an  untaught,  tropistic 
seeking  for  objects  of  primary  devotion — and  yet  differs 
from  all  hereditary  mechanisms;  it  is  a  form  of  self-aware¬ 
ness,  dealing  with  fluxes  in  the  being  of  the  will. 

Chapter  XVI.  Current  Fallacies  Regarding  Sin  .  125 

The  logic  of  moral  error — does  a  lie  prove  a  liar?  The  fal-  ^ 
lacy  of  cancelling  right  against  wrong;  the  fallacy  of  cus¬ 
tom,  to  the  effect  that  generality  diminishes  guilt;  the  fal¬ 
lacy  of  ‘  nature,  *  to  the  effect  that  the  natural  is  right. 

Chapter  XVII.  Instinct  and  Sin  ....  135 

No  primitive  impulse  taken  by  itself  is  wrong;  but  in  the 
human  mind  no  impulse  is  by  itself,  and  crude  impulses  are 
presumably  not  justified  in  remaining  crude;  sin  as  failure 
to  give  an  impulse  its  achievable  meaning,  i.e.,  as  failure 
to  interpret  it. 

Chapter  XVIII.  Sin  as  Blindness  and  Untruth  /  143 

The  descriptive  difference  between  sin  and  right  is  evanes¬ 
cent;  sin  may  consist  in  suppressing  an  increment  of  knowl¬ 
edge;  and  the  act,  by  virtue  of  its  environment,  will  then 
express  a  false  judgment. 


XV111 


CONTENTS 


Chapter  XIX.  Why  Men  Sin  .....  150 

Sin  cannot  be  causally  explained;  it  is  not  to  be  referred 
to  the  ‘stronger  motive/  nor  to  the  ‘curve  of  learning’;  but 
the  conditions  may  be  described  which  favor  the  above- 
mentioned  blindness,  namely,  the  existence  of  moral  di¬ 
lemmas.  Various  dilemmas  described.  The  complete  moral 
motive  combines  the  ruing  of  evil  with  the  attraction  of 

I 

Chapter  XX.  Sin  as  Status  .....  161 

Sin  as  deed  cannot  be  original.  But  beside  the  moral  act, 
there  is  a  moral  status ;  and  if  the  holy  will  is  a  status  to  be 
acquired,  it  is  presumably  not  inborn;  a  moral  status  may 
always  be  regarded  as  a  matter  of  fact,  and  as  such  neither 
to  be  punished  nor  rewarded;  it  becomes  a  corresponding 
question  of  fact  whether  such  status  has  metaphysical  im¬ 
plications.  The  metaphysical  assertion,  sin  involves  finitude 
or  mortality,  a  legitimate  addition  to  the  moral  motive,  if 
true. 


PART  IV 

EXPERIENCE 


Chapter  XXI.  The  Agencies  of  Remaking  .  .  .171 

Original  human  nature  always  a  factor  in  remaking  human 
nature:  ultimately  nothing  can  change  a  will  but  itself. 

But  outer  facts  must  furnish  data  and  incentives:  and  the 
co-operation  of  outer  and  inner  factors  of  change  is  ‘expe¬ 
rience.’  We  cannot  distinguish  between  social  and  indi¬ 
vidual  experience;  but  we  can  distinguish  between  free  ex¬ 
perience  and  experience  under  social  constraint. 

Chapter  XXII.  The  Task  of  Experience  .  .  .175 

Experience  has  (among  other  tasks)  to  effect  the  trans¬ 
formation  of  general  dispositions  into  individual  habits 
which  interpret  these  dispositions;  the  work  of  intelligence, 
curiosity,  and  play;  experience  in  active  form  as  experi¬ 
mentation. 

Chapter  XXIII.  The  Methods  of  Experience  .  .  180 

Pleasure  and  pain,  the  universal  instruments  of  experience, 
produce  different  results  upon  different  types  of  mind;  in 


CONTENTS  Xix 

the  human  being,  pain  leads  to  discrimination  and  thought, 
rather  than  to  blank  inhibition.  Human  experience  with  any- 
given  instinct  thus  takes  the  form  of  a  series  of  hypotheses 
as  to  what  it  wants,  constituting  a  more  or  less  coherent 
argument,  guided  chiefly  by  the  ‘mental  after-image’;  this 
argument  might  reasonably  be  called  the  ‘dialectic’  of  the 
will. 

Chapter  XXIV.  The  Dialectic  of  the  Will  :  The  In¬ 
dividual  and  Custom  .....  188 

What  pugnacity  wants,  described  in  a  typical  series  of 
hypotheses:  destruction,  revenge,  punishment,  cure;  this 
development  would  probably  take  place  were  there  no  social 
constraint  upon  the  expression  of  pugnacity.  The  basis  of 
individualism  in  social  theory ;  the  will  has  a  bent  of  its  own 
which  is  not  due  to  custom. 

PART  V 
SOCIETY 

Chapter  XXV.  Social  Modelling  .  .  .  .199 

The  presumption  that  social  pressure  warps  human  nature; 
and  the  counter  presumption  that  conventions  have  a  mean¬ 
ing. 

Chapter  XXVI.  Main  Directions  of  Social  Model¬ 
ling  ........  205 

Normally,  social  interference  facilitates,  and  carries  on 
farther  in  the  same  direction,  the  work  of  individual  expe¬ 
rience, — and,  for  that  matter,  of  organic  evolution  as  a 
whole;  as  instances:  ‘prolonging  the  vestibule  of  satisfac¬ 
tion,’  as  seen  in  the  case  of  hunger  and  sex;  the  widening 
of  the  horizon  of  action  together  with  increasing  discrimi¬ 
nation  or  restriction  of  objects  dealt  with.  Thus,  social 
action  is  not  primarily  repressive;  but  there  are  three  ways 
in  particular  in  which  it  becomes  so.  These  are  to  be  dealt 
with  in  order. 

Chapter  XXVII.  Ideals  and  Their  Recommenders  .  211 

Most  ideals  are  colored  by  the  selfish  wishes  of  those  who 
promulgate  them;  but  not  even  the  self-interest  of  society 
as  a  whole  takes  precedence  of  the  interest  of  its  members. 


XX 


CONTENTS 


Here  is  stated  an  individualistic  theory  of  ‘right’;  and  the 
postulate  is  deduced  with  which  society  must  comply  if  its 
ideals  are  to  be  right  ideals.  Various  social  arrangements 
which  help  to  secure  this  condition:  among  others,  the  nat¬ 
ural  function  of  the  Eecommender;  and  the  conflict  of  ab¬ 
stract  ideals. 

Chapter  XXYIII.  Laws  and  the  State  .  .  .  223 

When  we  consider  not  ideals,  but  the  material  basis  of  all 
instinct -satisfactions,  it  is  obvious  that  social  life  neces¬ 
sarily  requires  sacrifice,  and  that  the  question  of  the  social 
contract — is  society  worth  the  sacrifice? — is  not  fanciful. 

The  condition  under  which  a  social  life  can  be  free,  or  worth 
its  cost,  stated  in  a  second  postulate:  it  must  be  possible 
to  subordinate  competitive  interests  to  non-competitive 
interests;  this  postulate  can  be  complied  with  only  through 
the  existence  of  the  political  State:  the  existence  of  the 
State,  therefore,  is  something  which  men  necessarily  (hence 
unanimously)  will. 

Chapter  XXIX.  Institutions  and  Change  .  .  238 

No  institutions  wholly  comply,  and  perhaps  none  can  wholly 
comply,  with  the  foregoing  demands:  it  does  not  at  once 
follow  that  they  should  be  abolished.  It  is  to  be  considered 
that  part  of  the  maladaptation,  so  far  as  it  comes  to  con¬ 
sciousness,  is  an  incident  of  progress  itself;  and  that  human 
nature  is  adapted  to  maladaptation,  provided  that  it  can 
regard  all  existing  misfit  as  grist  for  its  will  to  power.  The 
highest  social  expression  of  the  will  to  power  is  found  in  the 
changing  of  institutions;  institutions  must  be  condemned, 
not  if  evil  exists  in  them;  but  if  it  persists.  Our  third  postu¬ 
late  is  that  institutions  shall  make  institutional  provision  for 
change,  as  their  unfitness  is  felt  and  diagnosed;  but  since 
it  is  the  wish  of  every  radical  and  experimentalist  that 
something  be  established,  he  has  an  inalienable  interest  in 
conservation.  Hence  a  fourth  postulate:  conserving  force 
must  be  proportionate  to  certainty. 

Chapter  XXX.  Education  .....  253 

The  activity  of  educating  has  an  instinctive  basis  and  func¬ 
tion;  it  requires  social  self-consciousness  and  self-criticism. 

It  is  commonly  regarded  as  a  sort  of  social  reproduction; 
but  it  must  provide  for  growth  beyond  the  type;  yet  the 
process  of  education  is  such  that  the  type  is  transmitted; 


CONTENTS 


XXI 


the  first  business  of  education  is  to  bring  a  will  into  exist¬ 
ence  ;  this  can  be  done  only  b y  exposing  all  instincts  to 
their  appropriate  stimuli.  Education  is,  first  of  all,  ex¬ 
posure;  and  this  exposure  can  only  be  effected  by  appre- 
ciators  of  the  goods  in  question.  The  exposure  should  be 
proportionate;  various  problems  considered;  education  of 
thought;  of  the  will  to  power.  Problems  of  adolescence; 
delay  in  acquisition  and  in  sex-expression;  sublimation  in 
the  planning-instinct,  and  in  world-building;  education  in 
originality;  the  self -elimination  of  society. 

Chapter  XXXI.  The  Right  of  Rebellion  .  .  .  280 

He  who  would  destroy  a  too  conservative  social  structure 
must  assure  himself  (1)  whether  it  has  the  good  will  to 
change;  and,  if  not,  (2)  whether  he  can  have  faith  in  its 
possible  good  will.  Society  has  the  same  two  questions  to 
answer  regarding  the  rebel.  There  can  be  no  legal  right  of 
rebellion;  but  this  does  not  decide  whether  rebellion  may 
be  right. 

Chapter  XXXII.  Punishment . 283 

Punishment  consists  in  making  the  external  status  corre¬ 
spond  to  the  internal  status.  The  criminal  must  be  distin¬ 
guished  from  the  rebel;  he  must  be  treated  as  possible  rebel 
and  as  possible  citizen.  The  State  has  no  choice  but  to 
punish;  yet  punishment,  administered  by  an  imperfect 
State,  contains  self-defeating  elements;  the  history  of  crimi¬ 
nal  procedure  shows  the  various  attempts  of  society  to  es¬ 
cape  this  dilemma;  but  their  chief  success,  so  far,  is  in 
localizing  the  injury.  The  restoration  of  the  criminal  to 
citizenship  must  be  the  work  of  forces  not  contained  in 
the  State  per  se;  in  punishing,  as  in  educating,  society  de¬ 
pends  for  its  success  on  agencies  beyond  its  own  border. 

PART  VI 

ART  AND  RELIGION 

Chapter  XXXIII.  Vox  Dei  .....  297 

Can  the  distinction  between  the  work  of  society  and  the 
work  of  religion  in  remaking  human  nature  be  maintained? 

The  historical  differentiation  has  apparently  ended  in  elimi¬ 
nating  the  distinct  Vox  Dei  as  useless;  reasons  for  doubt¬ 
ing  this  result;  and  proposal  of  a  method  for  discriminat¬ 
ing  the  work  of  society  from  that  of  further  factors. 


XXII 


CONTENTS 


Chapter  XXXIV.  The  Public  Order  and  the  Private 

Order  ........  304 

How  much  of  the  individual  man  can  find  expression,  or  be 
‘saved,’  in  each  of  the  two  orders  that  constitute  society, 
or  in  both  taken  together? 

Chapter  XXXV.  Society  and  Beyond  Society  .  .  309 

The  private  order  and  the  public  order  are  so  related  that 
each  not  alone  supplements  the  other,  but  presupposes  suc¬ 
cess  in  the  other;  this  success  is  always  rather  relative  and 
promissory  than  actual;  and  hence  at  no  point  can  life  in 
society  be  satisfactory,  unless  the  will  finds  some  point  of 
absolute  satisfaction  outside  society;  the  whole  psychologi¬ 
cal  structure  of  society  depends  on  some  provision  whereby 
the  wills  of  its  individual  members  (in  anticipation  of  the 
result  of  infinite  social  evolution)  may  attain  an  absolute 
goal;  this  need  is  professedly  supplied,  in  one  way  by  art; 
in  another  by  religion. 

Chapter  XXXVI.  The  World  of  Rebirth  .  .  .  317 

It  is  not  to  be  supposed  that  art  and  religion  undertake  to 
provide  only  for  residues,  or  lost  powers,  in  human  nature: 
their  business  is  with  the  whole  of  human  nature,  and  with 
residues  only  because  they  are  concerned  with  the  whole; 
in  early  law  and  custom,  at  the  time  when  these  were  still 
regarded  as  sacred,  we  find  art  and  religion  assuming  joint 
control  over  the  shaping  of  human  nature.  And  as  every  man 
was  considered  not  alone  subject  to  the  law,  but  also  a  trans¬ 
mitter  and  wielder,  if  not  a  maker,  of  the  law,  he  was  sup¬ 
posed  to  come  through  it  into  the  exercise  of  this  same  ulti¬ 
mate  control;  the  experience  of  ‘initiation’;  of  conversion: 
subordinating  social  passions  to  an  ulterior  passion. 

Chapter  XXXVII.  The  Sacred  Law  ....  322 

A  more  detailed  examination  of  the  sacred  law,  showing 
that  it  was  based  not  on  social  utility,  but  on  a  principle 
claiming  to  instruct  utility;  its  aesthetic  and  ethical  ele¬ 
ments;  truth  and  error  in  its  claim  to  validity. 

Chapter  XXXVIII.  Art  and  Human  Nature  .  .  339 

Art  wins  independence  from  all  religious  entanglements; 
in  this  free  shape  it  is  neither  wish-dream  nor  imitation  of 
fact:  it  is  a  symbolized  achievement  of  the  will  in  real  and 


4 


CONTENTS 


xxiii 

objective  media;  it  intends  to  have  the  force  not  of  law, 
but  of  convincing  language, — a  freer  development  of  law; 
beginning  as  an  effort  to  define,  and  thus  win  power  over  the 
object  of  common  desire — assuming  an  ascendency  over  the 
minds  of  the  desirers — it  finds  a  secondary  satisfaction  in 
creating  the  image  of  that  object;  it  thus  discovers  a  field 
of  objects  which  can  be  possessed  in  no  other  way  than  by 
thus  reproducing  them;  these  objects  are  called  ‘beauti¬ 
ful’;  art  becomes  especially  identified  with  the  activity  of 
possessing  the  beautiful,  in  which  all  socially  interested 
activity  is  suspended;  and  its  specific  passion  may  super¬ 
sede  all  social  passions;  direct  and  indirect  effect  of  art 
on  the  shaping  of  human  instincts:  the  inadequacy  of  art. 

Chapter  XXXIX.  Religion  per  se  .  .  .  .  351 

Religion  seems  left  empty  by  the  removal  of  law,  science, 
art,  etc.;  but  it  still  claims  a  positive  content,  makes  super¬ 
lative  claims  for  it,  and  has  found  devotees  who  declare 
its  passion  supreme  over  others;  we  cannot  understand  this 
fact  if  we  regard  the  ascetic  as  an  anomalous  and  parasitic 
denier  of  all  social  value;  it  can  only  be  understood  through 
the  psychological  necessity  that  all  social  values,  together 
with  those  of  law  and  art,  be  preserved  by  an  alternation 
between  attending  to  them  and  turning  away  from  them  to 
their  source.  Asceticism  thus  may  be,  and  historically  has 
been,  an  assertion  of  the  will  to  power;  but  it  has  been  a 
partial  and  imperfect  satisfaction,  and  must  give  way  to, 
or  be  included  within,  a  more  concrete  type  of  religion. 


PART  YII 

CHRISTIANITY 

Chapter  XL.  What  Christianity  Requires  .  .  363 

The  practical  injunctions  of  Christianity  are  directed 
toward  the  feelings,  and  thus  concern  the  theory  of  human 
instinct;  but  there  seems  to  be  a  psychological  ineptitude  in 
^  a  command  to  ‘love’;  hence  these  injunctions  are  commonly 
reinterpreted  in  terms  of  behavior;  there  are  reasons,  how¬ 
ever,  for  supposing  that  Christianity  may  have  meant  what 
it  says. 


XXIV 


CONTENTS 


Chapter  XLI.  Christianity  and  Pugnacity  .  .  368 

Society  transforms  pugnacity  into  constructive  critical  ac¬ 
tivity,  and  for  this  reason  cannot  comply  with  the  command, 

Judge  not;  not  only  in  the  public  order,  but  in  the  private 
order  also,  in  all  education,  the  critical  judgment  must  be 
active;  the  Christian  command  seems  an  abandonment  of 
justice  and  a  return  to  the  moral  indifference  of  nature; 
but  there  are  circumstances  under  which  it  may  be  the  pre¬ 
cise  opposite,  expressing  a  justice  not  to  the  static  but  to  the 
changeable  self;  these  circumstances  show  what  Christianity 
means,  and  dispose  of  the  opposite  errors  (1)  of  meaning¬ 
less  non-resistance  and  (2)  of  referring  the  ideal  to  a  dis¬ 
tant  future. 

Chapter  XLII.  Christianity  and  Sex-love  .  .379 

The  general  attitude  of  Christianity  toward  sex-love  is  as 
negative  as  toward  pugnacity;  from  the  individual  stand¬ 
point  it  is  not  obvious  that  sex-love  is  necessary,  as  pug¬ 
nacity  is  necessary;  though  the  psychological  function  of 
sex-love  must  be  performed ;  the  question :  What  is  this  psy¬ 
chological  function?  Beginning  as  a  craving  for  ‘sub¬ 
conscious  respiration,’  in  which  the  will  to  power  seems 
mingled  with  an  opposite  impulse  toward  self-abandonment, 
the  experience  of  love  is  one  of  progressive  discovery  of  its 
own  meaning;  this  meaning,  while  it  certainly  has  a  meta¬ 
physical  horizon,  is  not  Platonic:  it  is,  a  giving  of  concrete 
life,  i.e.,  life  of  soul,  body,  and  estate.  Christianity  assumes 
that  this  life-giving  impulse  can  be  satisfied  completely 
apart  from  marriage,  on  the  simple  ground  that  it  is  not 
the  deepest  thing  in  human  nature;  at  most,  it  is  next  to  the 
deepest;  it  proposes  philanthropy  and  art,  when  conjoined 
with  worship,  as  a  complete  ‘sublimation’;  but  its  intention 
is  that  its  ‘absolute’  meaning  shall  live  within  the  relations 
of  men  and  women,  not  displace  them;  and  just  because  its 
entire  interest  is  in  the  ultimate  meaning,  it  neither  criti¬ 
cises  nor  sanctions  any  particular  convention:  it  insists  on 
nothing  but  its  highly  simple  criterion. 

Chapter  XLIII.  Christianity  and  Ambition  .  .  396 

Early  Christianity  accommodated  itself  to  the  conditions 
of  State  life;  but  professed  scorn  for  all  those  things  after 
which  “the  Gentiles  seek”;  it  was  as  far  as  possible,  how¬ 
ever,  from  attempting  to  eliminate  ambition:  it  recognized 


CONTENTS 


XXV 


the  fact,  not  perceived  by  Buddhism,  that  ambition  is  the 
essence  of  religion;  it  undertook,  as  its  chief  positive  ap¬ 
peal  to  human  nature,  to  swing  all  energies  into  the  channel 
of  spreading  the  ‘  Kingdom  of  Heaven,  ’  an  interest  which, 
in  personal  form,  becomes  the  ‘passion  for  souls,’  the  most 
characteristic  product  of  Christianity;  it  exists  in  many 
recognizable  forms;  in  this  point,  the  meanings  of  all  the 
instincts  converge;  and  there  is  reason  to  regard  it  as  the 
ultimate  transformation  of  the  will  to  power. 

Chapter  XLIV.  The  Crux  of  Christianity  .  .  403 

It  is  precisely  in  this  form  of  the  ideal — that  of  the  will  to 
save  men — that  the  profoundest  objection  makes  itself  felt; 
the  ideal  is  fundamentally  presumptuous,  and  becomes  in¬ 
creasingly  impossible  to  contemporary  moral  diffidence  and 
modest  self-consciousness;  this  fact,  however,  is  an  addi¬ 
tional  reason  for  regarding  it  correct  as  an  interpretation 
of  Christianity;  for  this  was  the  ground  for  the  hostility 
provoked  by  the  doctrine  in  its  early  days;  and  the  moral 
difficulty  of  any  ideal  is  hardly  a  final  refutation  of  it; 
what  we  require  of  Christianity  is  that  it  be  responsible  for 
showing  how  the  ideal  is  possible. 

Chapter  XLY.  The  Theory  of  Participation  .  .  407 

The  ‘essence’  of  any  religion  is  to  be  found  not  in  its 
ethical  demand  upon  human  nature,  but  in  its  answer  to  the 
question  stated:  How  is  it  possible?  The  demands  of  Chris¬ 
tianity  create  a  logical  dilemma;  the  phenomenon  of  par¬ 
ticipation,  by  any  given  self,  in  the  properties  of  the  object 
known,  may  lead  to  a  solution,  provided  that  the  object 
known  can  be  an  absolute  or  divine  object,  having  the  quali¬ 
ties  and  powers  which  the  individual  cannot  claim  for  him¬ 
self;  the  objection  to  the  phrase  “the  will  to  power”  ad¬ 
mitted,  and  the  term  rendered  finally  harmless;  the  ideal 
of  ‘humility’;  but  the  difficulty  still  remains  that  the  indi¬ 
vidual,  as  imperfect,  cannot  perceive  the  divine  object. 

Chapter  XLVI.  The  Divine  Aggression  .  .  .  416 

The  logical  situation  resumed;  the  idea  of  salvation  from 
outside;  in  what  sense  obnoxious,  and  in  what  sense  rea¬ 
sonable;  the  kind  of  theology  by  which  Christianity  meets 
the  situation;  its  large  demands  on  belief;  probability  in 
metaphysics  out  of  place. 


XXVI 


CONTENTS 


Chapter  XLYII.  The  Last  Fact  ....  426 

Whether  the  ultimate  reality  of  the  world  is  such  as  Chris¬ 
tianity  affirms  it  to  be  is  a  question  of  fact;  and  this  ques¬ 
tion  cannot  be  completely  settled  by  philosophical  argu¬ 
ment;  an  act  of  personal  discovery  or  recognition  is  called 
for.  Recognition  is  a  part  of  the  operation  of  every  in¬ 
stinct;  as  the  food-getting  instinct  recognizes  objects  which 
may  serve  as  food,  so  the  total  instinct  of  man  will 
recognize  what  it  needs  in  the  world  of  metaphysical  reality, 
if  what  it  needs  exists  there ;  conversely,  metaphysical 
‘findings’  are  not  indifferent  theories,  but  are  matters  of 
life  and  death  for  the  human  instincts ;  they  form  part  of  the 
circuit  of  instinctive  life;  hence  the  beliefs  men  have  long 
held  are  to  some  extent  corroborated  by  the  fact  that  men 
have  lived  by  them;  but  in  auy  actual  belief,  imagination 
may  mingle  with  experienced  fact  in  unknown  proportions; 
our  beliefs  must  be  perpetually  revised  by  the  co-operation 
of  the  mystic  and  the  critic;  meantime  some  guide  to  in¬ 
dividual  judgment  may  be  had  by  historical  analysis,  en¬ 
quiring  what  elements  of  existing  beliefs  have  been  essen¬ 
tial  to  those  developments  of  instinct  which  give  our  civili¬ 
zation  its  characteristic  qualities.  Here  follows  a  rough 
sketch  of  such  an  analysis;  it  appears  that  the  belief  in 
a  quasi-maternal  relation  of  the  world  to  human  individu¬ 
als,  a  belief  partly  coincident  with  the  metaphysics  of 
Christianity,  has  been  at  the  basis  of  our  civilization;  and 
this  belief,  in  turn,  might  plausibly  be  explained  as  merely 
subjective  or  pragmatic;  objective  support  for  the  belief  in 
question,  men  have  supposed  themselves  to  find  in  the  his¬ 
torical  process  itself,  particularly  in  those  experimental 
sacrifices  which,  though  they  were  deeds  of  individual  men, 
have  seemed  to  carry  an  over-individual  and  authoritative 
significance.  Our  argument  ends  in  pointing  out  the  alter¬ 
natives  presented  to  individual  determination;  a  negation  of 
the  characteristic  metaphysics  of  Christianity  would  not 
necessarily  destroy  human  happiness:  it  would  discounte¬ 
nance  only  the  highest  aspiration,  and  would  render  futile 
only  the  best  of  the  past. 

Appendix  I.  The  Conception  of  Instinct  .  .  .  441 

Appendix  II.  The  Source  of  Obligation  .  .  .479 

Index  .........  491 


PART  I 


ORIENTATION 


% 


CHAPTER  I 


AN  ART  PECULIAR  TO  MAN 

IN  understanding  the  cycle  of  organic  life,  repro¬ 
duction  must  be  taken  together  with  death.  Repro¬ 
duction  is  most  obviously  a  way  of  overcoming  the 
failure  implied  by  individual  death, — it  is  an  answer 
to  death ;  but  death  is  also  an  answer  to  reproduction. 
For  without  the  due  process  of  individual  death,  repro¬ 
duction  must  long  since  have  brought  all  life  to  an  end 
by  its  own  excess.  In  the  process  of  reproduction,  then, 
nature  appears  to  accept  and  confirm  the  biological 
failure  of  the  individual  as  a  condition  of  the  success 
of  the  species. 

But  reproduction  is  more  than  a  device  for  continu¬ 
ing  the  species;  it  is  the  main  opportunity  for  new 
experiments.  However  variations  may  be  prepared,  it 
is  in  the  moments  of  the  transmission  of  life  that  they 
announce  themselves.  It  is  as  if  life  were  not  satisfied 
with  the  simple  success  of  the  species, — as  if,  feeling 
its  foothold  in  the  world  precarious,  it  must  be  for¬ 
ever  restless,  climbing,  multiplying,  and  fortifying  its 
shapes.  It  is  fertile  in  organic  inventions,  some  better 
and  some  worse,  some  persisting  and  some  vanishing. 
The  death  of  the  individual  is  thus  also  the  oppor¬ 
tunity  for  evolution. 

When  we  try  to  grasp  the  trend  and  meaning  of  this 


4 


ORIENTATION 


groping,  ramifying  process,  we  commonly  picture  ‘life* 
as  a  single  impulse,  personify  it,  and  regard  it  as 
striving  for  more  perfect  adaptation  to  its  world.  The 
world  is  relatively  stable:  life  is  endlessly  variable. 
Life  can  change ;  inorganic  nature  cannot :  if  either  is 
to  be  adjusted  to  the  other,  it  is  life  that  must  adjust 
itself  to  the  lifeless.  In  the  long  run — so  we  commonly 
suppose — it  is  the  environment  that  decides  which 
variations  are  better  and  which  are  worse :  better  and 
worse  are  simply  the  fitter  and  the  less  fit  to  hold  their 
own  in  such  a  world  as,  once  for  all,  we  have. 

Few  pictures  so  defective  as  this  have  had  such  wide 
acceptation.  Why  should  a  species  already  perfectly 
adapted  to  its  world  seek  to  improve  its  adaptation? 
It  is  not  the  species  that  has  failed, — it  is  the  individual. 
If  the  effort  of  life  is  for  adaptation,  it  must  be  to  pro¬ 
duce  better-adapted  individuals.  These  better  indi¬ 
viduals  also  die, — but  they  die  harder,  last  longer,  and 
accordingly  reproduce  less  and  at  less  cost:  so  far, 
the  species  is  less  successful,  the  individual  more  so. 

Further,  in  this  evolution  of  fitter  individuals,  the 
process  of  evolution  itself  changes.  The  experimental 
variation  at  the  point  of  reproduction — which  we 
ascribe  to  ‘life’  because  it  forms  no  discernible  part 
of  the  conscious  intent  of  the  parent  organisms — tends 
to  disappear.  With  a  less  frequent  succession  of  gen¬ 
erations,  and  fewer  offspring  in  each,  opportunities 
for  such  change  become  fewer.  But  with  longer  indi¬ 
vidual  lifetime,  the  possibilities  of  change  in  the  indi¬ 
vidual  and  through  individual  effort  become  greater; 


AN  AET  PECULIAB  TO  MAN 


5 


and — as  the  evidence  now  seems  to  stand — some  of 
these  changes  may  be  transmitted.  If  so,  evolution  be¬ 
comes  less  a  matter  of  experimentation  by  life-in-gen¬ 
eral  and  more  a  matter  of  conscious  individual  striving. 

Finally,  whatever  life  or  individuals  may  be  said  to 
strive  for,  it  is  not  merely  to  fit  an  environment.  Life 
strives  much  more  to  make  the  environment  fit  Itself. 
It  is  true  that  the  world  cannot  change  itself :  but  life 
has  the  alternative  of  fitting  itself  to  the  world  or  fitting 
the  world  to  itself,  and,  to  judge  by  behavior,  it  prefers 
the  latter.  It  is  true  that  physical  nature  is  inexorable 
and  that  life  is  frail,  hut  it  is  also  true  that  life  is  end¬ 
lessly  elastic,  masterful,  and  persistent.  It  finds  that 
it  can  bring  small  parts  of  nature,  increasingly  large 
parts  of  nature,  under  control,  and  that  nature  under 
control  is  a  servant  completely  docile,  and  incapable  of 
rebellion.  Hence,  wherever  we  find  conscious  indi¬ 
viduals,  there  we  find  efforts  to  make  the  world  over 
into  forms  auspicious  for  the  purposes  of  those  living 
beings  themselves. 

Using  the  word  art  in  the  widest  sense,  as  including 
all  conscious  efforts  to  remake  the  world,  we  may  say 
that  all  animal  behavior  includes  some  degree  of  out¬ 
wardly  directed  art.  While  life  permits  its  world  to 
shape  it,  it  promotes  thereby  the  artisanship  by  which 
it  shapes  the  world. 

There  is  but  one  exception,  presumably,  to  the  rule 
that  the  arts  of  animals  are  directed  to  the  environ¬ 
ment.  The  human  being  does  deliberately  undertake, 
while  reshaping  his  outer  world,  to  reshape  himself 


6 


ORIENTATION 


also.  In  meeting  unsatisfactory  conditions, — scarcity 
of  food,  danger,  etc., — tlie  simpler  animal  does  what 
it  can  to  change  those  conditions.  The  human  being  does 
likewise;  but  there  sometimes  occurs  to  him  the  addi¬ 
tional  reflection,  “  perhaps  there  should  be  some  change 
in  myself  also.,,  Scarcity  of  food  may  become  to  him 
an  argument  for  greater  foresight  or  industry,  danger 
for  more  caution.  If  a  beast  is  threatened,  it  may  either 
fight  or  retreat:  if  a  man  is  threatened,  he  may  (while 
dealing  with  the  facts)  become  a  critic  also  of  his  own 
fear  or  anger. 

Man  thus  becomes  for  himself  an  object  of  artful  re¬ 
construction,  and  this  is  an  art  peculiar  to  man.  What¬ 
ever  is  done  in  the  world  by  way  of  producing  better 
human  individuals,  whether  for  the  benefit  of  the 
species  or  for  the  ends  of  individuals  themselves,  man 
is  an  agent  in  it:  it  is  done  not  merely  to  him  but  by 
him.  He  has  become  judge  of  his  own  nature  and  its 
possibilities.  “ Evolution’ ’  leaves  its  work  in  his  hands 
— so  far  as  he  is  concerned. 

I  do  not  say  that  man  is  the  only  creature  that  has  a 
part  in  its  own  making.  Every  organism  may  be  said 
(with  due  interpretation  of  terms)  to  build  itself,  to 
regenerate  itself  when  injured,  to  recreate  itself  and, 
in  striving  for  its  numerous  ends,  to  develop  itself — to 
grow.  It  may  be,  as  we  were  saying,  an  agent  in  evolu¬ 
tion.  But  in  all  likelihood,  it  is  only  the  human  being 
that  does  these  things  with  conscious  intention,  that 
examines  and  revises  his  mental  as  well  as  his  physical 
self,  and  that  proceeds  according  to  a  preformed  idea 
of  what  this  self  should  be.  To  be  human  is  to  be  self- 


AN  AET  PECTJLIAB  TO  MAN 


7 


conscious;  and  to  be  self-conscious  is  to  bring  one’s 
self  into  the  sphere  of  art,  as  an  object  to  be  judged, 
altered,  improved. 

Human  beings  as  we  find  them  are  accordingly  arti¬ 
ficial  products ;  and  for  better  or  for  worse  they  must 
always  be  such.  Nature  has  made  us:  social  action 
and  our  own  efforts  must  continually  remake  us.  Any 
attempt  to  reject  art  for  “nature”  can  only  result  in 
an  artificial  naturalness  which  is  far  less  genuine  and 
less  pleasing  than  the  natural  work  of  art. 

Further,  as  self-consciousness  varies,  the  amount  or 
degree  of  this  remaking  activity  will  vary.  And  self- 
consciousness  is  on  the  increase.  M.  Bergson  has 
strongly  argued  that  consciousness  (including  self- 
consciousness)  has  no  quantity;1  but  I  must  judge  that 
among  the  extremely  few  respects  in  which  human 
history  shows  unquestionable  growth  we  must  include 
the  degree  and  range  of  self-consciousness.  Whatever 
psychology  may  be,  it  is  only  a  self-conscious  being 
that  could  have  developed  such  a  science.  The  com¬ 
paratively  recent  emergence  of  this  science,  and  also 
the  persistent  advance  of  the  subjective  or  introspec¬ 
tive  element  in  literature  and  in  all  fine  art  are  tokens 
of  the  increasing  self-consciousness  of  the  race.  And 

1  Les  donnees  immediates  de  la  conscience,  ch.  i.  Naturally  one  can 
define  a  situation,  such  as  the  relation  of  being  aware  of  an  object,  of 
which  one  must  say  that  it  either  exists  or  does  not  exist, — without 
variations  of  degree.  Such  is  Natorp’s  interpretation  of  Bewusstheit, 
not  essentially  different,  I  think,  from  the  consciousness  of  which  Berg¬ 
son ’s  statements  are  true.  But  such  a  situation  is  palpably  an  abstrac¬ 
tion  from  the  time-filling  reality  indicated  by  1 1  consciousness  ’  ’  to  which 
Bergson  himself  wishes  to  call  attention. 


8 


ORIENTATION 


as  a  further  indication  and  result  of  this  increase,  the 
art  of  human  reshaping  has  taken  definite  character, 
has  left  its  incidental  beginnings  far  behind,  has  be¬ 
come  an  institution,  a  group  of  institutions. 

Among  the  earliest  of  men  the  shaping  of  human 
nature  must  have  been  carried  on  by  such  sporadic  ex¬ 
pressions  of  criticism  and  admiration  as  pass  perpetu¬ 
ally  between  the  members  of  any  human  group, — acting 
then,  as  they  still  act  upon  ourselves,  like  a  million 
mallets  to  fashion  each  member  somewhat  nearer  to  the 
social  heart’s  desire.  Wherever  a  language  exists,  as 
a  magazine  of  established  meanings,  there  will  be  found 
a  repertoire  of  epithets  of  praise  and  blame,  at  once 
results  and  implements  of  this  social  process. 

Such  a  vocabulary  needs  only  to  exist  in  order  to  act 
as  a  constant,  inescapable  force ;  but  the  effect  of  cur¬ 
rent  ideals  is  redoubled  when  a  coherent  agency,  such 
as  public  religion,  assumes  in  their  behalf  a  deliberate 
propaganda  and  lends  to  them  the  weight  of  all  time, 
all  space,  all  wonder,  and  all  fear. 

No  man  can  be  wholly  indifferent  to  what  his  fellows 
wish  him  to  be ;  but  the  aggressive  and  pointed  demands 
of  the  gods  with  their  unknown  capacities  for  injury 
and  benefit  raise  the  whole  matter  to  a  new  stage  of 
importance.  For  many  centuries  religion  was  the  chief 
repository  of  the  ripening  self-knowledge  and  self-dis¬ 
cipline  of  the  human  mind  because  in  the  effort  to  see 
himself  as  the  gods  saw  him  man  became  most  keenly 
self-conscious,  most  alive  to  what  he  might  make  of 
himself.  Now,  besides  this  original  agency  we  have  its 
offshoots,  politics,  education,  legislation,  the  penal  art, 


AN  ART  PECULIAR  TO  MAN 


9 


as  independent  institutions  for  the  reshaping  of  human 
nature. 

The  agencies  have  thus  become  diverse,  and  to  some 
extent  have  lost  touch  with  one  another.  What  the 
family  would  like  to  make  of  the  child,  the  state  of  the 
citizen,  the  church  of  the  communicant,  the  fraternity 
of  its  fellow,  the  army  of  the  soldier,  the  industrial 
order  of  the  worker,  the  revellers  of  their  comrade, — 
these  are  not  all  in  conspicuous  accord:  and  it  is  not 
certain  that  any  of  them  are  in  accord  with  what  an 
individual,  who  may  assume  in  turn  all  of  these  char¬ 
acters,  may  want  to  make  of  himself.  Nevertheless,  the 
raw  material  of  human  nature  is  the  same  in  all  these 
contexts.  Plastic  as  it  is,  it  still  has  a  character  of  its 
own.  Versatile  as  it  is,  there  must  be  a  degree  of  con¬ 
sistency  in  the  moulds  that  are  put  upon  it.  Submissive 
as  it  seems  to  be,  all  its  acceptances  of  standard  from 
outside  are  tentative;  in  the  long  run,  the  standards 
by  which  human  nature  is  to  be  remade  must  be  its  own. 
Obscure  as  is  its  presentiment  of  what  it  wants  to  be, 
that  presentiment  is  its  ultimate  guide;  and  the  more 
confused  the  voices  that  assume  to  dictate  to  it,  the 
more  its  need  of  an  authentic  interpreter. 

It  is  the  especial  responsibility  of  philosophy  to  meet 
this  need.  Its  obligation  is  to  serve  as  a  critique  of  all 
the  diverse  experimental  self-criticism  of  mankind;  it 
ought  to  clarify  that  presentiment  of  human  destiny, 
and  thus  give  so  far  as  may  be  a  rational  voice  to 
human  self-consciousness.  It  is  for  the  philosophical 
sciences, — psychology,  ethics,  etc.  (certainly  not  for 


10 


ORIENTATION 


psychology  alone), — to  consider  man  and  what  can  he 
made  of  him ;  and  thns  to  make  themselves  the  specific 
servants  of  the  art  peculiar  to  man. 


CHAPTER  II 


THE  EMERGENCE  OF  PROBLEMS 

FOR  all  the  agencies  which  are  now  engaged  in 
remaking  mankind,  three  questions  have  become 
vital.  What  is  original  human  nature?  What  do  we 
wish  to  make  of  it?  How  far  is  it  possible  to  make  of 
it  what  we  wish? 

I  say  that  these  questions  have  become  vital,  because 
(though  they  sound  like  questions  which  any  wise 
workman  would  consider  before  beginning  his  work) 
they  are  not  in  any  historical  sense  preliminary  ques¬ 
tions.  It  is  always  our  first  assumption  that  we  already 
know  both  what  human  nature  is  and  what  we  wish  it 
to  be.  Nothing  is  more  spontaneous  and  assured  than 
the  social  judgment  which  finds  expression  in  a  word 
of  passing  criticism :  yet  each  such  judgment  ordinarily 
assumes  both  these  items  of  knowledge.  And  it  assumes, 
further,  that  human  nature  in  the  individual  criticised 
could  have  been,  and  without  more  ado  can  now  become, 
what  we  would  have  it.  If  we  convey  to  our  neighbor 
that  he  is  idle,  or  selfish,  or  unfair,  and  if  he  perceives 
our  meaning,  nothing  but  wilful  failure  to  use  his  own 
powers  (so  our  attitude  declares)  can  account  for  any 
further  continuance  in  these  ways.  Now  and  always, 
all  spontaneous  human  intercourse — a  nest  of  un¬ 
avowed  assumptions — takes  for  granted  the  common 


12 


ORIENTATION 


knowledge  and  acceptance  of  standards — at  least  the 
fundamental  ones — and  their  attainableness.1 

It  is  only  as  a  result  of  much  failure  in  the  effort 
to  remake  men  that  the  question  of  possibility  gains  a 
status  and  a  hearing.  It  is  this  same  experience  which 
suggests  that  there  is  such  a  thing  as  a  6  human 
nature/  offering  a  more  or  less  constant  resistance  to 
the  remaking  process.  These  two  questions,  of  possi¬ 
bility  and  of  original  nature,  are  therefore  not  inde¬ 
pendent  :  we  have  to  consider  the  human  material  just 
because  it  is  this,  primarily,  which  sets  a  limit  to  the 
human  art. 

y  It  may  be  regarded,  I  dare  say,  as  a  discovery  of 
religion  that  there  exists  a  4 natural  man’  who  behaves 
as  a  quasi-inevitable  drag  upon  the  flights  of  the  spirit. 
No  agency  could  struggle,  as  religion  has  struggled, 
toward  definiteness  in  its  notions  of  what  men  ought 
to  be  without  at  the  same  time  winning  a  large  experi¬ 
ence  of  the  hindrances  to  the  achievement.  It  lay  in  the 
situation  from  which  the  concept  of  human  nature 
arose  that  the  first  picture  of  the  natural  man  should 
be  disparaging.  To  say  that  mankind  is  by  nature  bad 
is,  in  its  origins,  only  a  more  sophisticated  way  of  say¬ 
ing  that  virtue  is  difficult. 

i  One  reason  why  conversation  always  assumes  such  knowledge,  and 
such  possibility,  may  be  that  conversation  is  itself  a  momentary  asser¬ 
tion,  and  realization,  of  an  ideal.  In  conversation  the  mind  of  each  has 
laid  aside  its  egoistic  boundary,  as  far  as  the  fact  of  communication 
goes,  and  has  so  far  ‘universalized  itself.’ 

A  large  part  of  the  meaning  of  our  ordinary  postulates  of  knowledge 
and  freedom  might  with  advantage  be  stated  in  these  terms:  You  must 
admit  as  general  principles  whatever  is  implied  in  your  own  act  of 
entering  into  this  community  of  action  which  we  call  conversing. 


THE  EMEKGEJSTCE  OF  PKOBLEMS  13 

But  religion  is  by  no  means  alone  in  this  experience. 
Legislation  and  the  social  sciences  have,  with  becom¬ 
ing  slowness,  and  each  in  its  own  way,  reached  the 
conclusion  that  there  is  a  human  material  to  be  reck¬ 
oned  with,  having  properties  akin  to  inertia,  just  be¬ 
cause  each  has  found  its  original  assumption  of  trans¬ 
parent  rationality  and  freedom  difficult  to  maintain. 
Economics,  in  setting  up  a  typical  man  whose  self- 
devoted  prudence  should  consistently  stand  above 
suspicion,  certainly  postulated  a  very  moderate  degree 
of  virtue  even  for  the  sake  of  the  argument;  but  no 
science  has  more  thoroughly  discarded  its  error,  or 
more  heartily  undertaken  the  task  of  reckoning  with 
the  non-reasoning  strands  in  the  human  fabric. 

Politics,  especially  the  liberal  politics  of  the  past  two 
centuries,  was  inclined  to  build  its  faith  upon  the 
existence  of  a  reasonable  public  and  a  reasonable  gov¬ 
ernment.  But  the  disillusioned — not  disheartened — 
liberalism  of  to-day  turns  itself  heart  and  soul  to 
psychological  enquiry.  It  perceives  that  there  is  a 
human  nature  which  invites  the  use  of  the  same  prin¬ 
ciple  that  Bacon  applied  to  physical  nature, — some¬ 
thing  having  laws  of  its  own  which  must  be  obediently 
examined  before  we  can  hope  to  control  it.  “The 
Great  Society, 9  9  whether  it  is  to  be  ruled,  or  educated, 
or  saved,  or  simply  lived  in,  has  to  be  taken  as  a  meet¬ 
ing  ground  of  forces  to  which  we  would  better  apply 
the  name  instinctive  or  passional  than  simply  rational. 
Thus  the  experience  of  all  social  enterprises  seems  to 
converge  in  the  common  admission  that  human  nature 


14 


ORIENTATION 


is  a  problem,  because  human  possibility  has  proved 
a  problem. 

But  these  problems  are  not  so  far  identical  that  the 
recognition  of  a  ‘nature’  to  be  dealt  with  at  once  closes 
the  question  what  can  be  done  with  it.  On  this  issue 
wide  differences  of  judgment  are  still  possible.  On 
one  side  it  may  be  held  that  this  human  nature  is 
unlimitedly  plastic, — we  can  make  of  it  anything  within 
reason ;  at  the  other  extreme  it  may  be  held  that  it  is 
fundamentally  fixed, — we  may  refine  it  and  polish  it 
but  can  change  none  of  its  essential  passions.  Let  us 
look  more  closely  at  the  present  condition  of  this 
discussion. 


CHAPTER  III 


ON  THE  POSSIBILITY  OF  CHANGING  HUMAN 

NATURE 

WE  are  said  to  have  an  immediate  consciousness 
of  freedom,  that  is  to  say,  of  wide  margins  of 
possibility.  If  this  consciousness  could  be  translated 
into  a  definite  proposition,  it  would  presumably  assert 
not  alone  “I  can  do  (within  these  wide  margins)  what 
I  will,,,  but  also,  “I  can  become  what  I  will.” 

There  have  been  times  when  this  ‘  testimony  of  con¬ 
sciousness  ’  has  carried  much  weight,  even  to  the  point 
of  being  held  decisive;  there  have  been  other  times 
when  it  has  forthwith  been  rejected  as  more  probably 
than  not  an  illusion  on  the  ground  that  intuition  is  the 
most  untrustworthy  of  all  modes  of  knowledge.  At  pres¬ 
ent,  there  is  less  disposition  to  believe  that  we  have 
within  ourselves  either  a  fountain  of  deception  or  a 
fountain  of  finished  truth:  we  are  inclined  rather  to 
question  what  precisely  this  intuition  means,  and  to 
seek  that  meaning  in  facts  of  a  more  objective  order, 
such  as  the  structure  of  the  human  being,  or  his  historic 
doings. 

As  to  structure,  human  nature  is  undoubtedly  the 
most  plastic  part  of  the  living  world,  the  most  adapt¬ 
able,  the  most  educable.  Of  all  animals,  it  is  man  in 
whom  heredity  counts  for  least,  and  conscious  building 
forces  for  most.  Consider  that  his  infancy  is  longest, 


16 


ORIENTATION 


his  instincts  least  fixed,  his  brain  most  unfinished  at 
birth,  his  powers  of  habit-making  and  habit-changing 
most  marked,  his  susceptibility  to  social  impressions 
keenest, — and  it  becomes  clear  that  in  every  way  nature, 
as  a  prescriptive  power,  has  provided  in  him  for  her 
own  displacement.  Having  provided  the  raw  material, 
nature  now  charters  man  to  complete  the  work  and 
make  of  himself  what  he  will.  His  major  instincts  and 
passions  first  appear  on  the  scene  not  as  controlling 
forces,  but  as  elements  of  play,  to  be  tried  in  a  thousand 
modes  and  contexts  and  admitted  but  slowly  to  the 
status  of  settled  habit  in  forms  chosen  by  the  player. 
Other  creatures  nature  could  largely  finish :  the  human 
creature  must  finish  himself. 

And  as  to  history,  it  cannot  be  said  that  the  results 
of  man’s  attempts  at  self -modelling  appear  to  belie  the 
liberty  thus  promised  in  his  constitution.  Just  as  he  has 
retired  his  natural  integument  in  favor  of  an  artificial 
clothing,  capable  of  expressing  endless  nuances  not 
alone  of  status  and  wealth,  but  of  temper  and  taste  as 
well, — conservatism  or  venturesomeness,  solemnity, 
gaiety,  profusion,  color,  dignity,  carelessness  or  whim, 
— so  his  natural  mentality  appears  to  have  served  as  a 
neutral  medium  to  be  fashioned  into  equally  various 
modes  of  character  and  custom.  That  is  a  hazardous 
refutation  of  socialism  or  of  any  other  proposed  revo¬ 
lution  which  consists  in  pointing  out  that  its  success 
would  require  a  change  in  human  nature.  Under  the 
spell  of  particular  ideas  monastic  communities  have 
flourished,  in  comparison  with  whose  demands  upon 
human  nature  the  change  required  by  socialism — so  far 


WHAT  IS  POSSIBLE?  17 

as  it  calls  for  purer  altruism  and  not  pure  economic 
folly — is  trivial.  To  any  one  who  asserts  as  a  dogma 
that  ‘  ‘  Human  nature  never  changes,  ’  *  it  is  fair  to  reply, 
“It  is  human  nature  to  change  itself.’ ’ 

When  one  reflects  to  what  extent  racial  and  national 
traits  are  manners  of  the  mind,  fixed  by  social  rather 
than  by  physical  heredity,  while  the  bodily  characters 
themselves  may  be  due  in  no  small  measure  to  sexual 
choices  at  first  experimental,  then  imitative,  then  habit¬ 
ual,  one  is  not  disposed  to  think  lightly  of  the  human 
capacity  for  self-modification. 

But  it  is  still  possible  to  be  skeptical  as  to  the  depth 
and  permanence  of  any  changes  which  are  brought 
about  by  conscious  strain  and  effort.  Admitting  the 
interest  of  knowing  what  is  possible  by  way  of  the 
curious  or  heroic,  it  is  still  more  important  to  know 
the  level  to  which  all  curves  tend  to  return  after  the 
fortuitous  effort  and  circumstances  are  withdrawn. 
Our  immediate  consciousness  of  freedom  may  prove  to 
have  as  much  and  as  little  significance  as  our  quite 
similar  feeling  of  physical  ability,  it  may  be  valid  pri¬ 
marily  for  the  moment  in  which  it  occurs.  I  feel  just 
now  as  if  I  could  leap  to  any  height,  and  this  feeling 
is  not  wholly  deceptive:  I  could  indeed  do  so  except 
for  the  gravity  of  things  in  this  part  of  space,  which 
will  announce,  in  the  next  moment,  the  level  I  can  reach 
and  where  I  must  come  to  rest.  Similarly,  there  are 
few  maxims  of  conduct,  and  few  laws,  so  contrary  to 
nature  that  they  could  not  be  put  into  momentary  effect 
by  individuals,  or  by  communities.  No  one  presumes 


18 


ORIENTATION 


^  to  limit  what  men  can  attempt;  one  only  enquires  what 
the  silent  forces  are  which  determine  what  can  last . 

What,  in  our  own  society,  is  the  possible  future  of 
measures  dealing  with  divorce,  with  war,  with  political 
corruption,  with  prostitution,  with  superstition?  En¬ 
thusiastic  idealism  is  too  precious  an  energy  to  be 
wasted  if  we  can  spare  it  false  efforts  by  recognizing 
that  pugnacity,  greed,  sex,  fear,  and  the  like,  are  per¬ 
manent  ingredients  of  our  being,  and  set  fixed  limits 
to  what  can  be  done  with  us.  Is  human  nature  so  yield¬ 
ing  and  characterless  as  it  seems  to  itself  in  moments 
of  sated  and  quiescent  appetite,  when  it  appears  docile 
to  any  mould?  Do  we  not  know  that  the  aboriginal  pas¬ 
sions  have  definite  bents  of  their  own,  with  recurring 
and  relentless  cravings,  long  thoughts,  and  smoulder¬ 
ing  revenges,  such  as  no  ruler  within  the  self  or  outside 
of  it  does  well  to  ignore?  Machiavelli  was  not  inclined 
to  make  little  of  what  an  unhampered  ruler  could  do 
with  his  subjects;  yet  he  saw  in  such  passions  as  these 
a  fixed  boundary  to  the  power  of  the  Prince.  “It  makes 
him  hated  above  all  things  to  be  rapacious,  and  to  be 
a  violator  of  the  property  and  women  of  his  subjects, 
from  both  of  which  he  must  abstain. ’  71  And  if  Machia¬ 
velli  ’s  despotism  meets  its  master  in  the  undercur¬ 
rents  of  human  instinct,  governments  of  less  deter¬ 
mined  stripe,  whether  of  states  or  of  persons,  would 
hardly  do  well  to  treat  these  ultimate  data  with  less 
respect. 

It  is  peculiarly  the  legislator  who  needs  wisdom 
about  the  possibility  of  durable  changes  in  human 

1  The  Prince,  ch.  xix. 


WHAT  IS  POSSIBLE? 


19 


character,  and  who  in  ages  of  effort  to  improve  man¬ 
kind  by  law  shonld  have  gained  some  empirical  wisdom 
of  his  own,  since  he  must  deal  with  masses  and  aver¬ 
ages.  And,  in  fact,  we  find  a  kind  of  official  legislative 
pessimism  or  resignation,  voiced  frequently  by  the 
wise  and  great  from  Solomon  to  this  day.  At  present 
it  derives  large  nourishment  from  statistics.  The  secu¬ 
lar  steadiness  of  the  percentages,  let  us  say  of  the 
major  crimes,  shows  in  the  clearest  light  where  the 
constant  level  of  no-effort  lies.  When  Huxley  likened 
the  work  of  civilization  to  the  work  of  the  gardener 
with  his  perpetual  warfare  against  wildness  and  weeds, 
he  pictured  a  philosophy  for  the  legislator.  The  world- 
wise  lawgiver  will  respect  the  attainable  and  maintain¬ 
able  level  of  culture,  a  level  not  too  far  removed  from 
the  stage  of  no-effort. 

Indeed,  there  are  many  who  believe,  at  present,  that 
our  social  pilots  would  do  well  to  relax  their  strain 
in  the  field  of  conscious  character-building  and  turn 
their  attention  back  again  to  the  stock.  Perhaps  nature 
was  sagacious  after  all  in  making  her  improvements 
primarily  at  the  point  of  reproduction.  If  anything  , 
extensive  is  to  be  accomplished,  may  not  eugenics  offer 
a  better  prospect  than  eternal  discipline?  The  future 
of  the  race  may  conceivably  be  found  in  a  new  and 
scientifically  developed  aristocracy  of  blood.2  With  the 
old  material  nothing  important  can  be  achieved. 

2  I  say  1  aristocracy,  ’  because  evidently  under  our  present  arrange¬ 
ments  the  lesser  breeds  would  necessarily  continue  to  exist  side  by  side 
with  the  new  stock  for  some  little  time,  and  the  gap  must  widen  between 
the  two.  How  to  induce  these  rear-guards  to  seek  Nirvana  is  one  of  the 
awkward  problems  of  the  eugenic  program. 


20 


ORIENTATION 


How  different  from  this  legislative  pessimism  is  the 
above-mentioned  pessimism  of  religion.  The  great  reli¬ 
gions  have  spoken  ill  of  original  hnman  nature;  but 
they  have  never  despaired  of  its  possibilities.  No 
sacred  scripture  so  far  as  I  know  asserts  that  men  are 
born  ‘free  and  equal*;  but  no  accident  of  birth  is  held 
by  the  major  religions  (with  the  exception  of  Brah¬ 
manism)  to  exclude  any  human  being  from  the  highest 
religious  attainment.  In  spite  of  the  revolutionary 
character  of  their  standards,  they  are  still,  for  the  most 
part,  committed  to  the  faith  that  these  standards  are 
reachable.  And  they  have  so  far  entrusted  themselves 
to  this  faith  that  the  entire  accumulation  of  scientific 
knowledge  regarding  the  determination  of  character, 
regarding  heredity,  and  especially  regarding  the  in¬ 
stincts,  leaves  them  unmoved.  This  may  be  a  case  of 
the  usual  indifference  of  religion  to  “ progress’ *;  but 
more  probably  it  is  a  deliberate  rejection  of  the  view 
that  the  born  part  of  man  is  decisive.  Beligion  declines 
to  limit  the  moral  possibility  of  human  nature. 

Thus  in  the  world  of  practical  endeavor  as  in  the 
world  of  theory  the  two  extreme  positions  in  the  prob¬ 
lem  of  possibility  still  confront  one  another.  One  might 
suppose,  since  the  question  is  a  practical  one,  that 
experience  would  long  ago  have  settled  the  matter. 
And  probably,  if  experience  could  have  settled  the 
matter,  it  would  have  been  settled  long  ago. 

For  after  all,  how  would  you  judge  from  experience 
what  the  possibilities  of  human  nature  are?  All  the 
remaking  agencies,  religion  added,  have  failed  to  make 


WHAT  IS  POSSIBLE  ? 


21 


a  world  of  saints,  or  any  resemblance  thereof.  True; 
but  they  have  made  some  saints.  And  in  a  question  of  s 
what  is  possible,  negative  experience  counts  for  noth¬ 
ing  if  there  is  but  a  single  positive  success. 

As  for  the  rest,  their  failure  may  indeed  be  due  to 
the  incapacity  of  average  human  nature.  But  there  are 
many  other  conceivable  reasons  for  it,  such  as  lack  of 
effort,  lack  of  faith,  political  pessimism  itself,  and 
finally,  lack  of  wish.  Is  it  altogether  certain  that  the 
saint  of  history  is  the  one  human  success  and  hence  the 
pattern  for  all  mankind?  To  the  coldly  political  eye, 
his  leaven  seems  to  lose  much  of  its  distinction  as  it 
spreads  through  the  lump, — as  if  the  role  hardly  fitted 
the  majority.  Indeed,  those  who  pursue  to  the  end  the 
counsels  of  perfection  tear  away  from  the  mass;  and 
the  best  examples  stand  in  splendid  isolation.  Maj 
it  not  be  true  that  the  goal  of  character  which  seems 
possible  only  to  the  few  is  closed  to  the  many  only  be-  j 
cause  they  cannot  be  brought  wholly  to  desire  it?  A 
revised  conception  of  what  is  desirable  may  bring  a 
revised  view  of  what  is  possible. 

We  turn,  then,  to  consider  the  status  of  our  third 
problem,  What  do  we  wish  to  make  of  human  nature? 


CHAPTER  IV 


WHAT  CHANGES  ARE  DESIRABLE? 
LIBERATION  VERSUS  DISCIPLINE 

OF  all  the  doubts  that  invade  our  primitive  assur¬ 
ance,  the  last  to  arise,  and  the  most  disconcert¬ 
ing,  is  the  doubt  whether  we  know  what  we  want.  We 
inhale  our  ideals  as  we  accept  our  mother-tongue :  and 
so  great  is  the  momentum  of  the  vocabulary  of  lauda¬ 
tion  that  it  is  long  before  we  discover  that  not  all  eulo¬ 
gistic  epithets  can  be  embodied  in  one  being, — not  even 
in  a  god.  Mr.  Bosanquet  has  instanced  Falstatf  as 
disproof  of  the  notion  that  right  and  wrong  are  ulti¬ 
mate  qualities  of  the  universe : — -for  who  can  approve 
Falstatf  Js  principles,  and  yet  who  would  willingly 
consign  him  to  hell?  But  is  not  the  difficulty  this,  that 
the  praiseworthy  and  delightful  qualities  of  Sir  John 
would  be  hard  to  unite  with  certain  other  reputable 
qualities,  such  as  responsibility  and  temperance ;  and, 
generally  speaking,  that  among  the  ideals  which  we 
all  accept  seriatim  there  is  conflict?  If  so,  the  natural 
inference  is  simply  that  these  ideals,  taken  one  by  one, 
are  somewhat  false  and  abstract.  Neither  singly  nor 
jointly  do  they  furnish  a  true  picture  of  what  we  wish 
human  nature  to  be;  and,  in  brief,  we  do  not  (concep¬ 
tually)  know  what  we  wish  it  to  be. 

In  this  unavowed  condition  of  groping  ignorance, 


WHAT  IS  DESIRABLE  ? 


23 


mankind  has  made  (equally  unavowed)  use  of  certain 
guiding  principles,  among  which  is  this:  that  if  any¬ 
thing  is  impossible,  it  is  not  wholly  desirable.  Ideals 
are  attainable;  ergo,  what  is  not  attainable  is  not  an 
ideal. 

Every  failure  to  impress  a  nominal  ideal  upon  human 
nature,  therefore,  works  two  ways:  it  strengthens  the 
critics  of  human  nature,  the  legislative  pessimists,  and 
the  rest ;  but  it  also  casts  doubt  upon  the  validity  of  the 
nominal  ideal.  Men  who,  in  quest  of  such  ideals,  have 
submitted  to  much  discipline  have  sometimes  come  to 
rebel,  not  because  they  have  reached  their  limit,  but 
because  the  friction  of  the  process  has  led  them  to  sus¬ 
pect  the  authority  of  the  goal.  Such  seems  to  have  been 
the  experience  of  the  Buddha,  who  after  six  years  of 
exalted  austerity  in  the  Uruvilva  forest  suddenly 
turned  his  back  upon  his  Brahmanic  guides.  And  such, 
in  another  vein,  may  have  been  the  experience  of  the 
pleadingly  defiant  Omar.  In  such  cases,  when  i  Nature 
rebels/  she  rebels  not  as  a  traitor,  but  in  the  name  of 
a  different  conception  of  rightful  rule.  The  average 
man,  I  presume,  has  always  doubted  in  his  reticent 
way  whether  those  counsels  of  perfection  are  alto¬ 
gether  what  they  claim  to  be;  whether  the  gain  in 
brilliance  and  purity  has  not  been  purchased  by  some 
loss  in  the  virtues  of  reality  and  concrete  serviceable¬ 
ness;  whether,  on  the  whole,  something  more  like 
“ Follow  Nature”  may  not  be  a  truer  guide  to  a  wholly 
desirable  human  quality. 

There  have  been  eras  in  history,  eras  of  liberation, 


24 


ORIENTATION 


when  the  general  voice  of  this  average  man  has  set 
itself  against  the  tyranny  of  prevailing  discipline. 
They  have  been  eras  like  the  Renaissance  in  which  the 
hypocritical  seams  in  the  traditional  strait- jackets 
have  become  especially  visible,  as  well  as  the  too- 
interested  character  of  the  profession  that  men  are 
free  to  become  what  they  are  commanded  to  become. 
But  every  age  has  its  party  and  its  prophet  of  libera¬ 
tion,  its  Ronssean,  its  Schlegel,  its  Whitman,  its 
Nietzsche, — prophets  always  more  or  less  philosophi¬ 
cal,  and  sometimes  political  as  well.  The  principle  of 
the  Liberator  is,  Follow  thine  own  inner  nature, — 
Express  thyself.  As  legislator  he  is  anything  but  a 
pessimist,  not  because  he  thinks  that  the  older  dis¬ 
cipline  is  possible,  but  because  he  thinks  that  whatever 
ought  to  be  is  possible,  and  that  merely  a  minimum  of 
discipline  ought  to  be. 

V  The  general  influence  of  the  philosophy  of  evolu¬ 
tion  has  been  liberating  in  this  sense.  Not  long  ago, 
Spencer  deduced  from  his  Biological  View  the  obvious 
doctrine  of  any  naturalistic  ethics,  that  (other  things 
being  equal)  all  ‘ functions ’  ought  to  be  exercised.  For 
what  else  do  functions  exist  but  to  be  exercised?  There 
is  a  flattering  piety  in  thus  following  the  intentions  of 
Nature,  which  are,  besides,  much  more  certainly  de¬ 
cipherable  than  the  other  oracles  of  God.  It  is  true,  we 
are  obliged  to  do  a  certain  amount  of  guessing :  but  at 
least  one  trend  of  Nature  may  unhesitatingly  be  af¬ 
firmed, — a  tendency  to  the  increase  of  life,  measured 
in  terms  of  these  functional  activities.  The  rule  for 


WHAT  IS  DESIKABLE? 


25 


human  culture  takes  a  shape  like  the  rule  of  the  medi¬ 
cal  art:  Regard  life  as  a  quantity;  conserve  and  in¬ 
crease  it ;  avoid  all  forms  of  repression. 

The  evil  of  repression — an  inevitable  accompani¬ 
ment  of  discipline — is  primarily  simply  that  it  is 
repression,  i.e.,  subtraction  from  life.  But  beside  this 
quantitative  evil,  we  are  assured  by  Freud  and  his 
school  that  repression  is  the  root  of  numerous  psychi¬ 
cal  disorders.  Freud’s  importance  to  the  cause  of 
liberation  lies  in  his  showing  the  very  mechanism  of 
the  process  by  which  the  ignoring  of  Nature  is  pun¬ 
ished.  The  repressed  tendency  is  not  destroyed;  and 
though  it  must  persist  in  sub-consciousness  it  continues 
to  act  in  its  prison ;  and  because  it  cannot  act  normally, 
acts  to  the  distortion  of  fancy,  of  thought,  of  person¬ 
ality  itself.  This  hypothesis  of  the  persistence  of  the 
repressed  impulse1 — ascribing  to  it  a  distinct  and  in¬ 
destructible  reality,  like  that  of  a  quantum  of  energy — 
is  in  its  origin  a  clinical  hypothesis  for  the  explanation 
of  abnormal  mental  states.  But  it  does  not  remain  a 
theory  for  explaining  mental  disease  alone.  It  writes 
a  new  chapter  in  general  psychology,  the  neglected 
chapter  concerning  the  persistence  of  mental  energies, 
their  transformations  and  equivalents.  It  appears  as 
a  basic  proposition  to  the  effect  that  original  human 
nature  is  not  characterless,  that  it  has  a  bent  and  cur¬ 
rent  of  its  own,  that  it  cannot  be  overruled  without 
limit  by  the  censorious  artifices  of  convention  nor  the 
ideals  of  morality  and  religion.  Through  all  such  dis¬ 
ciplines,  what  you  primevally  are  wins  its  way.  Thus 

i  Discussed  below,  pp.  98,  193. 


26 


OEIENTATION 


the  ‘new  psychology ’  becomes  a  theoretical  support  for 
the  gospel  of  self-expression,  and  a  revised  ethics. 

The  rule  of  life  which  these  researches  immediately 
suggest  is  formulated  by  various  writers.2  The  ethical 
problem  reduces  to  this :  to  find  such  a  mode  of  satis¬ 
fying  any  wish  that  all  other  wishes  may  also  be  satis¬ 
fied.  This  is  clearly  the  principle  of  a  democratic  society 
applied  to  human  desires.  The  only  admissible  remak¬ 
ing  in  a  regime  of  this  sort  is  such  mutual  adjustment 
of  the  methods  of  satisfaction  that  our  numerous 
impulses  may  live  together  in  harmony.  The  sacrifi¬ 
cial  choices  of  the  older  discipline  are  not  merely  un¬ 
intelligent  ;  they  are  immoral. 

It  is  clear  that  the  freedom  which  interests  these 
prophets  of  liberation  is  not  the  freedom  discussed  in 
the  previous  chapter, — freedom  to  control  and  modify 
desire :  it  is  the  freedom  to  assert  desire .  If  we  affect 
freedom  in  the  former  sense,  a  freedom  which  can  only 
be  displayed  by  submitting  to  self-imposed  demands, 
we  do  but  punish  ourselves.  Such  freedom,  they  hold, 
is  no  more  than  a  Quixotic  liberty  to  imprison  our  own 
nature.  The  rights  of  self-government  are  not  properly 
to  be  vested  in  any  such  transcendent  ‘ruling  faculty’ 
as  the  Stoics  tried  to  enthrone :  these  rights  should  lie 
with  those  primary  impulses  which  emerge,  with  life 
itself,  from  mother  earth. 

It  might  be  imagined  that  the  religions  of  redemp- 

2  Notably  by  E.  B.  Holt,  The  Freudian  Wish.  See  also  H.  E.  Hunt, 
The  Hidden  Self  and  its  Mental  Processes;  H.  C.  Miller,  The  New  Psy¬ 
chology  and  the  Teacher. 


WHAT  IS  DESIBABLE  ? 


27 


tion,  with  their  dubious  view  of  the  worth  of  original 
human  nature,  and  demands  of  rebirth,  would  find 
themselves  at  odds  with  the  Liberators.  And  so,  to 
some  extent,  it  has  been.  But  the  Liberator  is  media¬ 
tory,  and  can  offer  an  interpretation  of  regeneration 
itself,  such  as  liberal  phases  of  religion  are  not  wholly 
disinclined  to  consider.  Let  us  say  that  ‘to  save’  means 
simply  ‘not  to  waste,’ — not  to  destroy,  not  to  lose.  Re¬ 
gard  religion,  then,  together  with  ethics,  as  a  general 
economy  of  life,  having  definite  applications  in  the  field 
of  public  justice.3  The  work  of  religion  is  to  conserve 
a  maximum  of  energy,  of  value,  of  experience ;  to  pre¬ 
vent  friction  and  mutilation,  to  turn  all  things  to  ac¬ 
count.  A  large  part  of  the  older  meaning  of  conversion, 
it  is  true,  must  be  emptied  out.  Into  this  view,  no 
‘twice-born-ness’  of  the  type  depicted  by  William 
James  can  be  admitted :  the  precursory  sickness  of  soul, 
the  horror  of  being  cosmically  lost,  are  outgrown  trials. 
The  way  of  the  mystics,  wherein  overcoming  the  world 
meant  mortifying  the  flesh,  is  no  longer  to  be  followed. 
Hell  has  burned  out:  for  God,  himself  remade  in  the 

v 

image  of  the  expansive  spirit,  is  no  longer  thought  of 
as  one  who  can  whole-heartedly  exclude  any  individual 
or  denounce  any  thing.  The  ‘agonized  conscience’  of 
our  forefathers  may  be  satirized  as  the  passing  gesture 
of  a  ‘genteel  tradition’  now  empty  of  vitality.4 

The  liberal  religion  of  to-day  largely  accepts  this 
view,  and  makes  no  battle  for  the  ancient  discipline; 

3  As  in  the  recent  writings  of  Professor  T.  N.  Carver,  The  Beligion 
Worth  Having ;  Essays  in  Social  Justice. 

4  George  Santayana,  The  Genteel  Tradition  in  American  Philosophy. 


28 


ORIENTATION 


contemporary  Christians  incline  to  the  Confucian  doc¬ 
trine  of  the  native  goodness  of  man,  and  saving  only  a 
plea  for  some  kind  of  moral  order,  accept  the  general 
trend  toward  the  restoration  of  the  original  Adam  to 
respectability.  The  temper  of  onr  age  is  expansive :  it 
is  for  giving  freedom  to  everything  that  can  show  a 
claim  of  right;  it  is  partial  to  every  nnder-dog, — and 
are  not  the  primitive  passions  the  nnder-dogs  in  onr 
psychical  charade? 

It  is  perhaps  well  that  partisan  cries  for  the  return  of 
discipline  are  few;  for  any  such  cry  can  be  effective 
only  if  it  is  the  voice  of  our  own  experience.  If  our  lib¬ 
eralism  is  at  loose  ends,  there  will  be  signs  that  we  are 
conscious  of  it.  If  its  psychology  is  defective,  our  psy¬ 
chology  will  become  aware  of  the  fact  and  write  a  still 
newer  chapter.  If  the  freedom  to  control  oneself  and 
make  oneself  over  is  as  genuine  a  part  of  freedom  as 
the  freedom  to  be  ruled  by  original  desires,  a  suspicion 
that  the  Liberators  in  their  plans  for  satisfying  human 
nature  have  somewhere  thwarted  it  will  show  itself  in 
various  quarters,  in  letters,  in  politics,  in  education. 
And  even  in  the  course  of  the  continued  thinking  of 
the  greater  Liberators,  a  discovery  might  be  antici¬ 
pated  that  some  sort  of  censorship  is  a  part  of  original 
human  nature  itself.  Such  we  shall  see  to  have  been  the 
case. 

Meanwhile,  we  may  observe  for  ourselves  that  the 
simple  program  of  the  Liberator’s  ethics,  “So  satisfy 
each  wish  that  every  other  wish  may  also  be  satisfied, 9  9 
is  not  without  its  embarrassments.  Some  of  our  wishes 


WHAT  IS  DESIKABLE? 


29 


are  appetites ,  and  make  for  enjoyment,  more  or  less 
quiescent;  others  are  impulses ,  and  make  for  action. 
The  impulsive  man  and  the  appetitive  man  seek 
different  types  of  expression,  and  lead  to  modes  of  life 
not  easily  reconcilable. 

Thus,  the  natural  man  of  the  Nietzschean  ideal  is  a 
type  that  would  find  little  in  common  with  the  natural 
man  of  Rousseau:  he  is  far  more  strenuous,  less  dis¬ 
posed  to  avoid  pain  and  hardness,  rather  disposed  to 
make  himself  at  home  with  them.  Nevertheless,  like  his 
predecessor,  he  regards  himself  as  a  freed  man,  finds 
his  law  within,  and  defines  his  good  as  the  venting  of  his 
energies  upon  the  world.  He  is  a  hater  of  Christianity 
chiefly  because  Christianity  seems  to  him  to  check  those 
salutary  surgical  processes  among  men,  eliminating  the 
unfit,  which  a  liberated  pugnacity  would  naturally 
carry  out.  We  make  ourselves  soft,  we  suffer  more,  we 
try  to  ecape  suffering  by  still  more  softness  and  sym¬ 
pathy, — in  this  way  we  set  up  a  vicious  and  endless 
process  of  decline  in  manhood;  rather  give  free  ex¬ 
pression  to  a  normal  hardness,  in  personal  relations, 
in  competitions,  in  war, — in  the  end  all  will  suffer  less, 
and  the  over-man  will  be  born. 

The  Western  world  has  come  too  newly  from  initia¬ 
tion  into  the  inwardness  of  the  processes  of  mutual  de¬ 
struction  to  lend  a  ready  mind  to  the  Nietzschean  type 
of  liberation.  We  are  ready  to  judge,  perhaps,  that  the 
word  liberation,  by  itself,  is  not  a  final  answer  to  the 
question,  What  do  we  wish  to  make  of  ourselves? 
Human  nature  wishes  freedom, — that  is  so  nearly  a 
truism  that  it  stands  at  the  beginning  of  our  problem, 


30 


OKIENTATION 


not  at  the  end  of  it.  Freedom  is  a  great  word  with 
which  to  fight  oppression,  bnt  is  it  a  word  to  guide  the 
building  of  any  positive  conception  of  human  nature? 
It  has  been  so  effective  as  a  fighting-tool  that  Liber¬ 
ators  have  commonly  fallen  into  the  natural  delusion 
that  it  can  also,  without  further  ado,  construct  an 
ethics.  So  far  as  they  have  done  this,  they  have  become 
the  typical  word-worshippers  of  our  day,  and  have  left 
the  real  problems  of  human  living  untouched.  But  the 
greater  minds  among  them  have  seen  that  they  cannot 
stop  at  this  problem-concealing  word,  liberation. 


CHAPTER  V 


THE  LIBERATOR  AS  DISCIPLINARIAN 

1ET  us  first  follow  the  experience  of  some  of  the  older 
-J  Liberators,  of  Rousseau  and  the  Romanticists. 
Rousseau  is  usually  regarded  as  a  Liberator,  pure 
and  simple.  His  cult  of  Nature  has  the  ring  of  a  plea 
for  the  undisciplined  man,  man  as  his  impulses  un¬ 
spoiled  by  social  convention  and  law  would  make  him. 
But  Rousseau  worked  his  way  through  that  cult,  and 
lived  to  write  against  it.  The  opening  words  of  the 
Social  Contract,  “Man  is  born  free,  but  everywhere  he 
is  in  chains, ’  ’  sound  like  a  renewal  of  the  onslaught  on 
those  ‘  chains, ’  and  a  reiterated  assertion  of  the  glories 
of  natural  freedom.  But  the  situation  is  quite  the  oppo¬ 
site  ;  for,  as  he  proceeds  to  say,  it  is  now  his  intention 
to  “ justify’ ’  those  chains.  The  Rousseau  of  1762  was 
not  the  man  to  bring  fagots  for  a  general  bonfire  of 
human  fetters.  These  are  some  of  the  words  in  which 
he  gives  his  idea  of  the  relative  value  of  original  nature 
and  a  liberal  political  discipline : 

Passage  from  the  state  of  nature  to  the  civil  state  produces 
a  very  remarkable  change  in  man,  by  substituting  justice  for 
instinct  in  his  conduct,  and  giving  his  actions  the  morality 
they  formerly  lacked.  .  .  . 

Let  us  draw  up  the  whole  account  in  terms  easily  compared. 
What  man  loses  by  the  social  contract  is  his  natural  liberty, 


32 


ORIENTATION 


and  an  unlimited  right  to  everything  he  tries  to  get  and  suc¬ 
ceeds  in  getting.  What  he  gains  is  civil  liberty,  and  the  pro¬ 
prietorship  of  all  he  possesses. 

We  might  add  over  and  above  all  this  to  what  man  acquires 
in  the  civil  state,  moral  liberty,  which  alone  makes  him  truly 
master  of  himself.  For  the  mere  impulse  of  appetite  is  slavery ; 
while  obedience  to  a  law  which  we  prescribe  to  ourselves  is 
liberty.1 

Rousseau  had  experienced  something  like  an  intel¬ 
lectual  conversion;  and  for  our  present  purposes  we 
should  like  to  know  more  about  the  logic  of  it.  But  we 
shall  learn  less  on  this  point  from  Rousseau  than  from 
other  examples  of  the  same  process. 

Germany,  in  the  short  interval  between  Kant’s 
Critique  of  Practical  Reason  and  Hegel’s  Philosophy 
of  Right  passed  in  ponderous  and  explicit  argument 
through  the  entire  gamut  of  these  changes.  Kant  is 
the  unmatched  exponent  of  the  cause  of  discipline, 
perfect  prey,  therefore,  for  an  entire  school  of  Roman¬ 
tic  liberators.  It  remained  for  Hegel,  imbibing  all  that 
was  valid  in  the  Romantic  movement,  to  fan  into  an 
impressive  flame  the  embers  of  Rousseau’s  genius. 
Hegel  had  no  crusade  to  preach  against  human  in¬ 
stinct:  Kant’s  idea  of  a  transcendent  autocrat  in  the 
shape  of  formal  duty  found  little  response  in  him. 
Disjunctive  choices,  the  either-or’s  of  life,  are  wrong 
choices;  right  decision,  he  thought,  reaches  a  synthe¬ 
sis,  a  both-and.  So  far,  Hegel  is  of  one  voice  with 
Romanticism, — also  with  Freud  and  Holt. 

1  The  Social  Contract ,  Book  I,  ch.  viii. 


THE  LIBERATOR  AS  DISCIPLINARIAN  33 

But  what  Hegel  saw  (as  Romanticism  did  not)  is  that 
this  original  nature  of  ours  which  is  to  be  given  its 
liberty  is  something  very  different  from  a  bundle  of 
co-ordinate  wishes.  It  is  quite  as  much  a  bundle  of 
thoughts  or  ideas,  with  demands  of  their  own.  Of  all 
the  primitive  elements  in  man,  the  deepest  are  his  re¬ 
flective  and  social  dispositions ;  and  if  they  are  to  have 
any  freedom  at  all,  they  will  impose  a  certain  order 
upon  his  goings.  Like  the  talent  of  an  architect  which 
can  find  complete  scope  only  in  productions  having  a 
substance  and  system  of  their  own,  so  these  general 
human  talents  can  find  scope  only  in  the  law  and  cus¬ 
tom  of  a  social  order.  What  man  is,  thinks  Hegel,  is 
best  described  by  the  word  ‘ spirit,’  and  if  this  is  true, 
human  freedom,  like  the  freedom  of  the  Absolute 
Spirit  in  creating  the  world,  will  take  concrete  shape, 
and  will  look  very  much  like  submitting  to  bondage. 
Human  nature  can  only  blossom  out  under  various 
forms  of  discipline,  such  as  we  find  in  the  economic 
order,  the  family,  the  state:  without  conformity  to 
some  rule,  no  liberty. 

So  far,  Hegel’s  point  is  well  taken;  yet  Hegel  has 
failed  to  convince  the  world  at  large  that  his  variety 
of  liberty  is  genuine.  He  has  failed  to  convince,  not 
because  he  seemed  to  have  in  mind  the  Prussian  order 
rather  than  the  French  or  the  British  order,  but  be¬ 
cause  he  supplied  no  clear  way  of  distinguishing  be¬ 
tween  a  better  order  and  a  worse.  Agreed  that  only 
a  full  set  of  social  regulations  can  set  us  adequately 
free,  it  still  makes  an  immense  difference  how  those 
functions  are  adjusted, — all  the  difference  between  a 


34 


OKIENTATION 


conformity  that  is  far  ahead  of,  and  one  that  is  far 
behind,  the  freedom  of  nature.  It  is  the  lack  of  a  sharp 
and  usable  criterion  in  Hegel’s  thought  which  has 
given  the  seven  devils  their  opportunity.  To  advise  an 
uncritical  acceptance  of  the  status  quo  was  probably 
no  more  Hegel’s  intention  than  it  was  the  intention  of 
Burke  when  he  celebrated  the  value  of  prejudice  as  a 
source  of  English  stability  and  strength.  But  both 
thinkers  were  so  mightily  impressed  by  the  fact  that 
existence,  historical  existence,  WirMichkeit ,  is  the 
great  and  fundamental  merit,  that  both  neglected  to 
save  themselves  from  the  appearance  of  endorsing 
whatever  thus  exists  because  it  is  actually  there.  We 
shall  therefore  dwell  no  longer  on  Hegel.  In  him,  Ger¬ 
man  liberation  had  turned  disciplinarian ;  but  his  fail¬ 
ure  to  make  connection  with  the  needs  of  an  expanding 
popular  and  industrial  life  in  Germany,  like  the  failure 
of  Burke  to  appreciate  the  demand  for  reform  in  Eng¬ 
land,  made  it  necessary  for  the  nineteenth  century  to 
work  out  the  same  problem  in  another  key. 

It  is  precisely  this,  then,  that  our  own  naturalism  and 
liberalism  have  been  doing.  They  have  tried  to  make 
thorough  and  literal  earnest  of  the  proposal  to  set 
human  nature  free,  and  have  accordingly  been  drawn 
into  the  attempt  to  set  up  a  thorough  and  literal  inven¬ 
tory  of  all  the  ingredients  of  human  nature,  all  the 
instincts  that  are  to  be  satisfied.  It  is  not  surprising 
that  they  have  found,  as  Hegel  found,  certain  propen¬ 
sities  which  could  hardly  be  appeased  without  being 
allowed  to  assume  control  of  the  other  propensities. 


THE  LIBERATOR  AS  DISCIPLINARIAN 


35 


They  have  reported  as  an  empirical  discovery  what 
Rousseau  and  Hegel  asserted  a  priori ,  viz.,  There  are 
some  elements  of  human  nature  whose  liberation  is 
discipline. 

It  cannot  be  said  that  there  is  agreement  among  our 
empirical  students  of  human  nature  what  these  con¬ 
trolling  functions  are ;  but  it  has  become  evident  that 
our  gregarious  tendencies,  our  sexual  and  parental 
tendencies,  and  our  curiosity,  are  not  interests  simply 
co-ordinate  with  our  food-getting  and  defensive  dispo¬ 
sitions,  to  be  somehow  averaged  or  synthesized  with 
them.  Satisfaction,  for  them,  means  organizing  the 
whole  life  on  their  own  principle. 

It  is  an  element  of  strength  in  Nietzsche’s  philosophy 
that  he  not  only  sees  this  conclusion,  but  seizes  it  and 
builds  on  it.  He  revolts  against  the  discipline  of  Chris¬ 
tianity,  that  is  true:  but  he  revolts  still  more  against 
an  amiable  and  indiscriminate  expansionism.2  His  type 
of  liberation  was  one  that  demanded  the  utmost  severity 
of  self-pruning,  because  he  proposed  to  give  freedom 
to  one  of  the  masterful  elements  of  human  nature. 
Geist,  he  said,  ist  das  Leben  das  selber  ins  Leben 
schneidet;  and  almost  furiously,  in  his  demand  for  the 
sacrifice  of  the  unfit  in  self  as  well  as  in  others,  he 
parodies  the  Christian  paradox  that  life  is  to  be  saved 
by  losing  it. 

Thus  Nietzsche  expresses  the  logical  outcome  of 

2  For  this  reason,  Professor  Irving  Babbitt's  classing  of  Nietzsche 
with  Rousseau  as  a  Romanticist,  in  his  vigorous  and  enlightening  Masters 
of  Modern  French  Criticism,  seems  to  me  a  partial  truth  which  is  in 
danger  of  missing  what  is  most  characteristic  in  Nietzsche's  thought. 


36 


OKIENTATIOX 


nineteenth  century  naturalism.  As  a  goal  for  the  re¬ 
making  process  no  superman  yet  depicted  can  hold  our 
complete  allegiance:  but  so  much  can  be  said, — that 
our  question  can  no  longer  be  between  discipline  and 
liberation ;  it  can  only  be  a  question  of  what  discipline 
a  completely  free  man  will  have. 

Is  contemporary  expressionism  moving  along  the 
same  path!  There  are  some  signs  of  it.  The  psycho¬ 
analytic  movement  of  the  Freudians  began  with  an 
emphasis  on  the  evil  of  repression :  its  present  empha¬ 
sis  is  on  the  necessity  of  ‘  sublimation.  ’  Sublimation  is 
a  way  of  giving  vent  to  pent-up  impulses ;  but  it  is  a 
peculiar  way,  a  way  quite  different  from  inviting  them 
to  strike  out  for  themselves.  It  is  a  way  of  satisfying 
them  which  is  also  satisfactory  to  something  like  a  con¬ 
science  or  a  social  standard.  But  why  consider  these 
standards  !  If  they  are  to  be  considered  at  all,  it  is,  from 
the  psycho-analytic  point  of  view,  only  because  a  man 
cannot  be  at  variance  with  them  without  being  at  vari¬ 
ance  with  himself.  Not  that  Freudianism  gives  up  its 
polemic  against  the  censorship :  there  is  something  mis¬ 
chievous,  it  insists,  about  a  nominal  ideal  which  is  out 
of  the  reach  of  nature, — such  an  ideal  makes  hypocrites 
or  lip-servers  of  all  of  us.  6  ‘  Society  has  permitted  itself 
to  be  misled  into  putting  its  ethical  demands  as  high 
as  possible,’ ’  instead  of  putting  them  where  men  can 
readily  follow.  But  to  complain  of  ideals  as  being  4  ‘  too 
high”  is  not  to  complain  of  their  existence :  and  if  they 
are  allowed  to  belong  to  the  normal  equipment  of  man, 
the  censor  ceases  to  be  an  anomaly  and  a  tyrant.  Freud 


THE  LIBERATOR  AS  DISCIPLINARIAN 


37 


has  recently  gone  so  far  as  to  permit  himself  to  wonder 
whether  a  measure  of  the  sort  of  hypocrisy  involved  in 
having  ideals  may  not  be  a  necessary  means  of  prog¬ 
ress  ;  which  may  be  his  chosen  way  of  saying  that  one 
of  the  inseparable  qualities  of  an  ideal  is  to  be  difficult. 

The  ‘new  psychology ’  is  thus  visibly  at  work  on  a 
new  chapter  to  the  effect  that  not  all  repression  is  evil, 
— that  there  are  two  kinds  of  repression  or  constraint, 
one  of  which  is  abnormal,  the  other  inseparable  from 
personality. 

What  is  it  in  the  experience  of  expressionism  that 
is  working  this  gradual  change! 

Is  it  perhaps  a  perception  that  pure  expressionism 
contains  a  contradiction!  To  liberate  human  desires 
singly  may  result  not  in  the  liberation  of  human  nature 
but  in  its  disintegration.  Expressionism  takes  man 
piecemeal,  as  a  bundle  of  propensities  each  one  of  which 
has  to  be  heard  in  independence  of  the  rest, — one  de¬ 
sire,  one  vote.  If  the  art  of  human  life  consists  in  this 
kind  of  pluralistic  attention  to  the  pack  of  native  im¬ 
pulses  and  appetites,  that  amounts  to  a  surrender  of 
the  belief  that  it  has  any  meaning  as  a  whole.  But  it 
is  only  the  man  who  has  some  total  meaning  that  can 
have  any  sense  of  freedom.  Apart  from  such  a  unity  of 
purpose,  it  is  the  same  whether  he  says  he  gives  free¬ 
dom  to  his  desires  or  that  he  is  at  their  mercy.  Re  is 
free  in  doing  a  thing  only  in  so  far  as  he  can  find  him¬ 
self  in  what  he  does,  i.e.,  only  when  he  does  it  because 
it  is  an  element  in,  or  a  means  to,  what  on  the  whole  he 
purposes  to  do  in  the  world.  Drop  out  the  purpose,  and 
there  is  no  self  to  be  found  in  any  of  the  several  satis- 


38 


ORIENTATION 


factions  that  may  fill  the  day’s  program,  and  therefore 
no  freedom. 

Expressionism,  whether  in  psychology  or  letters  or 
ethics,  seems  to  imply  an  equal  respect  for  every  im¬ 
pulse.  In  practice,  however,  it  appears  to  be  an  exag¬ 
gerated  respect  for  the  sexual  and  physiological  man ; 
this  is  natural  enough  not  only  by  way  of  reaction,  or  as 
protest  against  prudery — no  longer  needed,  but  also  be¬ 
cause  it  is  in  dealing  with  the  ‘neglected  and  tabooed’ 
portions  of  human  nature  that  novelty,  or  the  sensa¬ 
tion  of  novelty,  is  easiest  to  obtain.  And  further,  expres¬ 
sionists  must  despise  reticence  on  principle,  not  alone 
because  reticence  is  unscientific,  but  because  reticence 
is  bound  up  with  the  belief  that  human  nature  has  unity. 
Admit  the  unity,  then  no  fragment  stands  alone, — every 
fragment  must  enquire,  “What  is  my  function!”,  has 
to  be  judged  not  by  itself  but  by  its  meaning  in  the 
whole.  The  animal-man  in  particular  can  no  longer  set 
up  an  autonomous  state:  it  is,  in  a  special  sense,  the 
property  of  the  person  who  uses  the  phrase  “my  body.” 
Down  with  the  totality,  then,  that  the  fragments  may 
be  free.  Every  destruction  of  unity  has  its  exhilara¬ 
tion,  every  repudiation  of  debt  gives  radical  relief 
and  sends  the  blood  pulsing:  maintaining  a  self  is  a 
costly  and  burdensome  program.  But  destruction  of  a 
self  is  even  more  costly,  and  thoroughgoing  expres¬ 
sionism  in  the  nature  of  the  case  can  only  co-exist  with 
a  mental  going-to-pieces. 

Hence  it  is  that  the  pure  liberators  are  gone — or  are 
going !  They  are  in  the  way  of  contributing  the  missing 
element  of  the  Hegelian  theory  of  freedom  through  re- 


THE  LIBEEATOE  AS  DISCIPLINAEIAN  39 

straint.  For  the  restraint  they  will  find  is  one  which 
belongs  intimately  to  hnman  nature  itself,  and  has  the 
power  to  choose  among  its  masters,  not  merely  docilely 
accept  what  is  pnt  upon  it. 


/ 


CHAPTER  VI 


AN  INDEPENDENT  STANDARD 

IN  a  century  of  thinking,  then,  we  have  made  head¬ 
way.  We  have  learned  much  from  our  Liberators 
about  what  we  do  not  want.  We  do  not  want  to  sup¬ 
press  or  get  rid  of  our  primitive  passions;  whatever 
is  to  become  of  them,  they  are  to  remain  with  us,  a  part 
of  what  we  permanently  are.  We  do  not  want  to  overlay 
them  with  a  “veneer  of  civilization, * ’ — that  kind  of 
artifice  is  even  less  substantial  than  its  name  implies. 
Nor  do  we  want  to  engage  in  a  persistent  struggle 
against  them,  as  if  against  gravity,  or  against  the  tend¬ 
ency  to  revert  to  a  wilder  type:  we  do  not  want  any 
'  ideal  vfiiich  implies  living  in  a  perpetual  moral  tension. 
If  human  nature  is  ta  be  changed  at  all,  it  is  to  be  only 
in  ways  that  will  leave  it  more  completely  satisfied. 

We  have  learned,  too,  that  human  nature  cannot  be 
satisfied  in  pieces,  because  among  the  original  pas¬ 
sions  there  are  some  that  make  for  structure  and  unity, 
and  give  substance  to  the  common  turn  of  speech  which 
says,  not  “My  desires  are  satisfied,”  but  “I  am 
satisfied.” 

But  with  all  that  we  have  learned  or  are  likely  to 
learn  from  experience  about  the  needs  of  human  na¬ 
ture,  it  does  not  follow  that  we  can  learn  from  empiri¬ 
cal  psychology,  however  accurate,  what  positively  and 
definitely  we  want  to  make  of  ourselves. 


A  1ST  INDEPENDENT  STANDARD 


41 


Psychology,  studying  the  facts  of  the  mind  as  a  thing 
of  nature,  is  at  a  disadvantage  for  determining  what 
any  of  these  facts  mean.  Thus,  when  psychology 
studies  perception  it  finds  in  its  hands  an  image  (Berke¬ 
ley’s  ‘idea,’  Hume’s  ‘impression’)  and  therewith  a 
pair  of  problems,  viz.,  how  this  image,  as  a  mental  fact, 
can  mean  an  object,  and  how,  as  a  particular  fact,  it 
can  mean  a  universal.  The  word  ‘ essence’  comes  again 
into  use  because  these  problems  exist  ;  it  calls  attention 
to  the  truth  that  what  psychology  finds,  as  mental  ex¬ 
istence,  is  simply  not  knowledge, — the  knowledge-ele¬ 
ment  of  perception  has  leaked  out  of  it.  Similarly  when 
psychology  studies  human  wishes,  it  is  likely  to  find 
everything  except  what  they  mean.  But  it  is  what  they 
mean  that  must  satisfy  them,  and  not  what  they  are  as 
psychological  facts. 

There  is  thus  a  logical  possibility  that  the  goal  of 
human  remaking,  without  being  contrary  to  nature,  is 
yet  beyond  nature,  in  the  sense  that  nature,  taken  by 

K 

itself,  fails  to  define  it.1  And  what  logic  suggests,  the 
quandaries  of  our  thinking  on  this  subject  seem  to  bear 
out.  What  is  it,  after  all,  that  our  ‘  nature  ’  would  have 
us  become?  Is  there  reason  to  think  that  we  can  find 
what  will  satisfy  nature  by  a  study  of  what  nature 
is  more  successfully  than  we  could  find  what  will 
satisfy  hunger  by  a  study  of  what  hunger  is,  apart 
from  all  knowledge  of  the  fruits  of  the  earth? 

If  we  make  the  mental  experiment  of  putting  ‘  in¬ 
stinct’  in  control  of  our  behavior,  we  shortly  discover 

i  After  the  analogy  of  those  schoolmen  who  taught  that  faith  without 
being  contrary  to  reason  is  beyond  reason. 


42 


ORIENTATION 


that  the  dictates  not  alone  of  instinct  in  general  but 
of  every  particular  instinct  are  ambiguous:  instinct, 
as  guide,  shows  a  fatal  lack  of  sense  of  direction ,  and 
one  suspects  that  even  where  it  seems  to  show  the  way 
it  is  covertly  depending  on  counsel  from  another  source. 
The  attempt  to  follow  a  leader  that  cannot  lead  may 
compel  the  discovery  that  our  real  guidance  is  to  be 
sought  elsewhere.  This  need  not  mean  that  the  pre¬ 
tender  should  be  slaughtered,  nor  even  excluded  from 
the  company ;  he  need  only  fall  in  behind  the  new  guide. 
Nature  may  well  exercise  a  veto  power,  or  a  second¬ 
ing  power,  without  having  the  capacity  to  make  defi¬ 
nite  positive  proposals.  If  there  is  anything  in  these 
surmises,  we  should  have  to  look  beyond  human  nature 
itself  for  the  thing  which  human  nature  should  become. 

Such  an  attitude  toward  nature,  considerate,  yet 
independent,  appears  in  the  ethical  thought  of  Plato, 
and  in  his  theory  of  education.  For  Plato,  the  goal  of 
education,  as  of  philosophy  and  religion,  was  the  at¬ 
tainment  of  a  blessed  vision,  a  state  of  insight  into 
things  as  they  are.  The  conditions  for  attaining  this 
goal  included  the  ascent  of  an  intellectual  ladder,  the 
dialectic;  but  they  involved  also  a  purgation  of  the 
desires,  a  genuine  remaking  of  the  natural  man.  The 
original  love  for  particulars  and  sensible  objects  must 
be  transformed  into  a  love  of  the  universal  and  abso¬ 
lute.  It  is  clear  that  a  goal  of  this  description  cannot 
be  deduced  from  the  rule  of  any  social  instinct,  nor 
of  any  other  instinct  observable  in  the  primitive 
human  animal.  And  Plato  has  often  been  regarded  as 


AN  INDEPENDENT  STANDARD 


43 


thoroughly  hostile  to  the  empirical  side  of  human  na¬ 
ture.  It  has  commonly  been  thought  that  the  dualism 
of  Christian  anthropology,  with  the  excessive  self-dis- 
trust  of  mediaeval  piety,  traced  largely  to  him.  But 
while  Plato  was  unquestionably  an  aristocrat  in  his 
attitude  toward  the  i  senses/  what  he  required  of  the 
natural  impulses  was  far  more  like  1  sublimation ’  than 
like  *  repression/  No  one  can  read  The  Banquet  in 
the  light  of  recent  psychology  without  realizing  how 
completely  Plato  understood  the  transformability  of 
passions  and  desires;  and  how  completely  in  his  view 
of  the  goal  of  human  endeavor  the  original  fund  of 
desire — considered  as  a  quantity — was  saved.  For 
him  there  existed  a  single  passion,  neither  unnatural, 
nor  yet  given  by  nature,  into  which  all  our  various 
natural  impulses  are  to  be  emptied  and  translated. 

Plato,  I  must  judge,  was  not  hostile  to  nature.  But 
he  had  certainly  not  lost  the  power  of  exclusion.  And 
it  is  not  out  of  the  question  that  liberal  religion,  too 
far  acquiescent  in  the  amiable  expressionism  of  the 
day,  may  regain  significance  for  its  concepts  of  evil 
and  conversion  or  rebirth  through  a  new  contact  with 
the  immortal  Greek.  For  Plato  could  still  liken  the 
philosophic  life  to  the  pursuit  of  death.  The  direc¬ 
tion  of  our  remaking  effort  he  conceived  to  be  as  dis¬ 
tinct  from  the  natural  slope  of  our  minds  as,  in  the 
philosophy  of  Bergson,  intuition  is  distinct.  In  Plato ’s 
universe,  death  and  matter  and  night  are  still  reali¬ 
ties  ;  and  the  destiny  of  souls  has  still  its  infinite  perils ; 
terror  and  repentance  are  rational  aspects  of  expe¬ 
rience;  the  way  to  life  leads  through  a  strait  gate. 


44 


ORIENTATION 


1  need  not  have  gone  back  to  Plato  to  find  an  illus¬ 
tration  of  the  doctrine  of  the  standard  which  is  inde¬ 
pendent  without  being  ruthless  in  its  disciplinary  de¬ 
mands.  Nor  yet  to  Spinoza,  who  sought  to  preserve 
and  yet  merge  all  passions  in  the  sense  of  necessity,  the 
intellectual  love  of  God.  Thinkers  have  always  existed 
who  have  found  the  following  of  ‘  nature  ’  as  vague  and 
inconclusive  as  the  following  of  fixed  law  is  schematic 
and  unreal.  At  the  present  moment,  there  are  those 
who  seek  ethical  and  educational  wisdom  in  a  general 
“ theory  of  value.’ ’  Such  a  theory  must  give  an 
account  of  what  is  common  to  all  the  different  goods 
in  the  world,  i.e.,  to  all  things  whatever  that  appeal  to 
the  human  being  as  having  worth  or  interest.  And  if 
it  looks  inward,  to  the  valuer,  and  backward,  to  the 
origins,  it  will  be  likely  to  ascribe  them  all  to  ‘feel¬ 
ing,’  or  ‘desire,’  or  ‘instinct’;  and  a  theory  of  libera¬ 
tion  will  emerge  merely  from  the  method  of  attack  on 
the  problem.  If,  however,  it  looks  outward,  to  the 
objects  of  value,  and  forward,  to  their  standards,  it 
is  likely  to  find  itself  dealing  with  an  ultimate  court 
which  gives  laws  to  nature,  rather  than  receiving  laws 
from  nature.2 

2  For  the  most  part,  present  writers  seek  to  refer  the  phenomenon  of 
the  ‘normativeness’  of  our  values  to  some  unity  within  the  self,  some 
‘  ‘  Einheit  der  Gefiihlslage,  ’  ’  not  defined  directly  in  terms  of  the  several 
elements  unified.  To  some  it  appears  as  ‘the  will’  (H.  Schwartz,  Psy¬ 
chology  des  Willens;  W.  Wundt;  H.  Miinsterberg,  etc.);  to  others  as 
‘personality’  (Lipps,  Pis  ethische  Grundprobleme,  ch.  i;  A.  Riehl, 
Einfuhrung  in  die  Philosophie ;  M.  Reischle,  Werturteile  und  Glaubens- 
urteile,  referring  all  values  to  a  Gesammt-ich-Gefiihl;  C.  Sigwart) ; 
to  others  as  some  function  of  reason  or  logic  (A.  Meinong,  Psychologisch- 
ethische  Untersuchungen,  whose  reference  of  moral  values  to  a  conceptual 


AN  INDEPENDENT  STANDARD 


45 


We  shall  be  prepared,  then,  to  find  that  that  which 
guides  onr  wishes  and  instigates  all  the  remaking  is 
a  spark  not  lighted  in  ‘  nature, ’  as  we  commonly  under¬ 
stand  the  term.  But  if  there  he  any  such  independent 
source  of  standards, — and  we  shall  not  here  prejudge 
the  question, — a  study  of  the  facts  of  human  nature, 
and  of  the  ways  in  which  various  agencies  do  in  fact 
work  upon  it,  should  make  that  further  fact  apparent. 
For  what  we  are  must  at  least  conspire  in  onr  own 
remaking  with  any  independent  principle;  and  with 
what  we  at  first  take  to  be  the  4 leadings  of  nature, ’ 
any  such  foreign  impulse  will  no  doubt  he  mixed.  If  it 
exists,  it  may  he  expected  to  reveal  itself  in  the  course 
of  onr  empirical  labor.  Without  attempting,  therefore, 
a  prior  critique  of  pure  will,  we  may  now  address  our¬ 
selves  to  that  labor. 

impartial  spectator  revives  memories  of  Adam  Smith;  J.  C.  Kriebig, 
Psychologische  Grundlage  eines  Systems  der  Werttheorie;  W.  Urban, 
Valuation,  Its  Nature  and  Its  Laws).  Yet  again,  there  is  here  and 
there  a  tendency  to  abandon  the  search  within  the  self  and  to  refer  the 
whole  matter  of  ultimate  standards  to  the  structure  of  the  world  we  live 
in,  or  to  the  conditions  for  improving  the  race  (R.  Goldscheid,  Zur  Ethilc 
des  Gesammtwillens,  also  EntwicTcelungswerttheorie,  etc.,  Leipzig,  1908). 


PART  II 


THE  NATURAL  MAN 


> 


<• 


'i 


V 


i 

( 


< 


CHAPTER  VII 


THE  ELEMENTS  OF  HUMAN  NATURE : 

THE  NOTION  OF  INSTINCT 

IT  is  no  longer  possible  to  share  the  confidence  of 
Hobbes  or  of  Rousseau  that  original  human  nature, 
in  distinction  from  all  that  education  and  civil  life  have 
made  of  it,  can  forthwith  be  described.  Certainly  not 
by  direct  introspection  can  any  man  draw  the  line  be¬ 
tween  what  is  natural  and  what  is  artificial  in  himself. 
Neither  can  we  find  examples  of  the  unaffected  natural 
state :  there  are  solitary  wasps,  but  there  are  no  soli¬ 
tary  human  infants ;  and  with  the  first  social  exchange 
the  original  self  is  overlaid.  Further,  this  very  modi¬ 
fication  of  native  character  by  interplay  with  an  outer  . 
and  social  world  is  a  condition  for  the  normal  appear¬ 
ance  of  later  dispositions;  an  experimental  isolation 
of  a  human,  being  for  the  sake  of  observing  his  natural 
behavior  would  thus  be  self-defeating. 

Our  idea  of  our  own  original  nature,  therefore,  must 
always  be-a  result  of  abstraction.  We  have  to  reach  it 
as  we  reach  other  non-isolable  ingredients  of  things, — 
namely,  by  framing  hypothetical  definitions  of  elements 
that  seem  to  show  a  degree  of  constancy,  and  allowing 
these  formulae  to  show  their  power,  or  lack  of  power, 
to  express  simply  the  facts  of  experience.  An  ‘instinct ’ 
is  such  an  hypothetical  unit. 


50 


THE  NATURAL  MAN 


The  notion  of  instinct  survives  a  long  history  and 
much  rough  usage,  literary,  scientific,  and  pseudo¬ 
scientific.  It  is  a  vagabond  concept;  it  has  served  to 
indicate  in  a  single  word  the  powers  that  animals  have 
and  man  has  not;  but  also  to  describe  the  profound 
traits  which  man  and  animals  have  in  common;  to 
impute  a  mysterious  discernment  or  guidance  to  cer¬ 
tain  special  types  of  knowledge  or  action ;  but  also  to 
explain  the  blind  beginnings  of  all  action ;  or  again  to 
cover  up  with  a  term  of  solemn  obscurity  our  residual 
ignorance  about  the  sources  of  any  action  whatever. 
It  has  served  the  purposes  of  the  naturalists  who  wish 
to  tie  human  nature  to  its  physical  connections;  and 
those  of  the  theologians  who  wish  to  make  fast  its 
permanent  susceptibility  to  the  supermundane.  If  such 
a  turncoat  concept  has  gained  scientific  standing,  it 
is  only  because  it  is  indispensable. 

It  is  indispensable  because  it  expresses  in  the  sim¬ 
plest  way  the  fact  of  heredity ,  taken  piecemeal.  For 
instincts  are  simply  the  elements  of  our  heredity  (so 
far  as  that  consists  in  dispositions  to  act  in  certain 
ways  rather  than  in  others)  regarded  in  its  common 
traits,  not  in  its  individual  characteristics.  The  inherit¬ 
ance  of  each  individual  includes  much  that  is  peculiar 
to  his  parents,  his  family,  his  racial  group :  it  includes 
also  certain  basal  traits  common  to  the  species.  It  is 
this  latter  part  that  is  meant  by  his  ‘  instinct. 9  But  as 
the  individual  peculiarities  may  be  regarded,  for  pur¬ 
poses  of  analysis,  as  due  to  unique  proportionings  of 
common  elements,  we  shall  not  go  far  astray  in  a  search 
for  the  common  clay  of  our  original  endowment,  if  we 


THE  NOTION  OF  INSTINCT 


51 


enquire  in  this  region  covered  by  the  word  instinct.  We 
shall  use  the  term  without  ascribing  to  it  any  occult 
or  explanatory  powers,  without  implying  that  an  in¬ 
stinct  is  a  ‘ force,’  an  unpushed  push,  or  an  ultimate 
source  of  energy,  or  even  that  instincts  exist  as  separ¬ 
able  units  of  character.  Our  hypothesis  shall  be  that 
if  we  are  to  analyze  the  original  human  endowment  at 
all,  instinct  is  the  most  concrete  unit  of  description  we 
can  use. 

We  shall  adopt  it,  further,  because  it  affords  us  at 
the  start  common  ground  with  the  biological  under¬ 
standing  of  human  nature.  We  wish  to  accept,  for  the 
sake  of  the  argument,  the  naturalistic  view,  namely, 
that  man  is  an  outgrowth  of  the  series  of  living  forms 
on  the  earth;  that  he  is  natively  a  group  of  instincts, 
due  to  that  derivation.  We  shall  allow  this  working- 
hypothesis  to  show  its  value,  and  the  limits  of  its  value. 

If  we  turn  then  to  the  biologist,  first  of  all,  with  the 
enquiry  what  characters  are  transmitted  in  ‘heredity/ 
and  how  they  are  transmitted,  we  are  invited  to  think 
of  the  original  organic  capital  as  a  set  of  ‘dispositions’ 
to  make  typical  ‘  reactions ’  to  typical  situations.  These 
dispositions  are  most  simply  conceived  in  the  psycho¬ 
logical  form  of  the  ‘reflex  arc,’  a  set  of  nervous  con¬ 
nections  whereby  an  element  of  the  situation  acting  as 
‘stimulus,’  the  disturbance  is  routed  to  those  specific 
muscles  which  affect  the  ‘response,’  with  an  adequate 
release  of  energy  by  the  way.  And  if  we  distinguish 
between  simple  reflexes  and  more  or  less  intricate 


52 


THE  NATURAL  MAN 


groupings  of  reflexes,  we  arrive  at  the  traditional  no¬ 
tion  of  the  physiology  of  instinct,  namely,  an  heredi¬ 
tary  arrangement  of  a  group  of  reflex-arcs  whereby 
its  members  follow  a  more  or  less  regular  serial  order 
to  a  significant  conclusion. 

The  serial  order  is  apparent  in  any  of  the  conspicu¬ 
ous  animal  instincts,  as  nest-building  or  wooing  and 
mating ;  or  in  such  a  sequence  as  carrying  objects  to  the 
mouth,  chewing  and  swallowing,  at  that  point  in  the 
seven  ages  of  man  when  these  actions  are  still  instinc¬ 
tive.  The  mechanism  of  the  serial  arrangement  is  also 
fairly  obvious :  the  conclusion  of  one  stage  of  the  pro¬ 
cess  furnishes  the  stimulus,  or  a  necessary  part  of  the 
stimulus,  for  the  next  stage.  Thus,  in  general,  the  series 
can  follow  but  one  order;  and  when  once  begun  tends 
to  continue  to  the  end. 

In  many  instincts,  perhaps  in  all  of  them,  the  stimu¬ 
lus  is  not  single  but  manifold;  an  internal  stimulus 
must  co-operate  with  an  external  stimulus  before  the 
response  can  take  place,  the  internal  stimulus  serving 
as  a  sign  that  the  organism  is  ready  to  act  in  a  certain 
way,  and  attuning  the  senses  to  especial  alertness 
toward  the  external  stimulus,  as  thirst  makes  one  keen 
to  all  signs  of  water.  If  the  internal  stimulus  is  per¬ 
sistent  (appearing  in  consciousness  as  a  craving)  while 
the  external  stimulus  is  occasional,  the  course  of  the 
corresponding  instinct  may  appear  irregular,  may  be 
latent  or  interrupted.  The  hen  ready  to  brood  is  pre¬ 
sumably  subject  to  an  inner  source  of  restlessness 
which  persists,  like  a  hunger,  until  in  presence  of  the 
nest  and  its  contents  the  long-deferred  behavior  sets 


THE  NOTION  OF  INSTINCT 


53 


in  with  well-known  determination  or  obstinacy.1  It  is 
not  difficult  to  invent  a  scheme  of  nervous  connections 
which  could  be  conceived  to  operate  in  some  such  way 
as  this  in  human  beings.  All  such  schemes  are  indeed 
too  simple  to  account  in  full  for  even  the  simpler  cases 
of  actual  behavior:  but  the  biologist,  like  other  scien¬ 
tists,  lives  by  faith  to  this  extent, — he  inclines  to 
regard  his  problem  as  solved  when  he  can  see  how  in 
principle  it  might  be  solved.  And  for  the  present  we 
may  assume  that  he  is  justified  in  his  faith,  if  not  by  it.2 

To  each  instinct  there  will  necessarily  belong  a  set 
of  motor  organs  which  may  be  assembled,  in  structure, 
as  a  single  organ-group,  or  may  be  dispersed.  To  the 
swimming  or  flying  or  spinning  instincts  are  bound 
the  distinctive  apparatuses.  With  the  beaver’s  build¬ 
ing  propensity  goes  the  beaver  ’s  tail.  And  vice  versa, 
with  every  such  group  of  motor  organs3  will  be  found 
an  instinct  for  its  operation.  There  is  thus  a  very  rough 
correspondence  between  bodily  shape  and  instinctive 
equipment:  the  instincts  are  inherited  with  the  body, 
as  its  behavior-charter,  so  to  speak. 

But  to  the  biologist,  the  notion  of  instinct  contains 
much  more  than  the  picture  of  a  mechanism  and  the 

1  Professor  Wallace  Craig  has  rendered  an  important  service  in  calling 
attention  to  the  prevalence  of  these  organic  factors  of  ‘appetence’  and 
‘  aversion  ’  in  instinct.  Following  him,  Professor  McDougall  goes  so  far  as 
to  say  that  “it  is  probable  that  all  instinctive  action  depends  in  some 
degree  on  Appetite.  ’  ’  Outline  of  Psychology,  p.  101. 

2  A  carefully  devised  set  of  graphic  schemes  has  been  developed  by 
Professor  Max  Meyer  in  The  Fundamental  Laws  of  Human  Behavior. 

3  Any  given  muscle,  it  must  be  understood,  may  appear  in  a  number 
of  such  groups.  The  distinctness  of  one  instinct  from  another  lies  in  the 
motor  group,  not  in  the  motor  units. 


54 


THE  NATURAL  MAN 


mode  of  its  operation.  The  mechanism  is  regarded  as 
a  unit  not  simply  because  its  activity  has  a  definite 
beginning  and  ending,  but  because  this  activity  reaches 
a  conclusion  which  we  called  significant.  More  accu¬ 
rately,  it  brings  about  a  situation  which  in  general 
favors  or  once  favored  the  survival  of  the  organism  or 
of  its  species.  Instincts  as  modes  of  behavior  common 
to  all  members  of  a  species  or  sex  of  the  species,  char¬ 
acterize  its  way  of  life,  outline  its  ‘habits’  in  the  major 
concerns  of  food-getting,  defence,  reproduction,  etc.  As 
hereditary  paths  of  least  resistance,  they  serve  as  a  sort 
of  initiation,  a  foreshortened  education,  for  the  vital 
activities  of  the  species. 

To  be  useful  in  this  way,  it  is  evident  that  they  must 
be  successful  with  a  minimum  of  training,  or  with  none. 
Social  imitation  helps  the  first  efforts  at  flying,  swim¬ 
ming,  song ;  but  it  is  the  untaught  and  unteachable  skill 
that  marks  instinct.  Few,  if  any,  instinctive  actions 
can  be  said  to  be  perfect  at  the  first  attempt  (unless 
such  unique  actions  as  breaking  through  the  egg-shell, 
and  even  then,  a  preliminary  rehearsal  or  a  second 
birth  might  well  produce  improvement).  But  the  in¬ 
stinctive  action  is  effective  from  the  beginning,  as  it 
could  not  be  effective  had  it  to  wait  for  either  experi¬ 
ence  or  instruction. 

This  relation  of  the  instincts  to  the  wider  interests 
of  the  organism  implies  a  further  fact  about  their 
physiology.  Their  nervous  circuits  include  branches 
that  run  through  the  highest  nervous  center.  The  in¬ 
stinct  is  under  cerebral  control;  and,  after  its  first 
quasi-mechanical  operation,  is  subject  to  modification 


THE  NOTION  OF  INSTINCT 


55 


through  its  bearing  on  other  processes  reporting  at 
the  center.  It  is  the  destiny  of  most  instincts  to  be¬ 
come  habits  shaped  by  experience  of  the  owner;  hence 
they  must  work  under  the  supervision  of  the  owner. 
They  are  not,  like  the  winking-reflex,  for  example, 
incidental  reactions  of  a  part  of  an  animal;  they  are 
reactions  of  the  whole  animal;  they  constitute  the 
whole  business  of  the  moment  of  their  operation.  It 
is  the  whole  animal  that  must  turn  from  other  business 
to  this  business,  and  retain  through  all  such  changes 
the  continuity  of  its  general  routine  or  program.  Hence 
the  release  of  an  instinctive  operation  is  never  accom¬ 
plished  by  the  sense-stimulus  alone,  as  if  some  outer 
hand  could  fire  a  train  which  must  then  run  its  course 
through  the  organism,  whether  it  assent  or  no :  there  is 
a  releasing  or  inhibiting  function  at  the  center  of  high¬ 
est  co-ordination. 

The  language  we  have  been  using  may  all  be  inter¬ 
preted  physiologically.  But  for  us,  the  significance 
of  an  instinct  comes  from  the  fact  that  its  physiologi¬ 
cal  aspect  has  at  each  point  some  bearing  on  the  primi¬ 
tive  mental  facts  of  which  we  are  in  search.  That  a 
nervous  loop  passes  upward  through  the  higher  centers 
means  to  us  that  an  instinct  is  an  element  of  con¬ 
sciousness  as  well  as  of  sub-consciousness;  it  falls 
within  what  we  call  a  mind,  a  memory;  it  builds  into 
a  continuous  experience,  and,  while  adding  to  it,  adds 
always  in  such  a  way  as  to  make  part  of  the  same  mind. 

From  the  conscious  side,  the  ‘ stimulus’  appears  as 
an  object  of  perception.  And  the  circumstance  that 


56 


THE  NATURAL  MAN 


this  object  tends  to  stimulate,  to  provoke  a  response, 
implies  that  the  perception  will  be  accompanied  by 
desire  or  aversion  as  well  as  followed  by  action.  Some 
vaguer  desire,  or  appetence,  commonly  precedes  the 
perception  and  gives  it,  when  it  comes,  the  significance 
of  an  opportunity,  whereupon  desire  takes  a  definite 
form:  “this  is  what  I  have  been  wanting.”  As  the 
nervous  channel  is  the  physical  link  between  a  particu¬ 
lar  stimulus  and  a  particular  response,  so  a  desire  is 
the  conscious  link  between  a  particular  perception  and 
a  particular  action.  Without  this  link  of  desire,  the 
other  two  mental  facts  would  not  be  parts  of  one  mind : 
for  the  desire  (or  appetite  or  aversion)  serves  as  the 
conscious  excuse  for  proceeding  from  the  perception 
to  the  action.  At  a  certain  level  of  reflectiveness  the 
desire  becomes  the  ‘motive,’  the  ‘purpose,’  the  ‘reason’ 
for  the  act;  but  at  every  level,  the  conscious  owner¬ 
ship  of  the  act  implies  that  it  is  ‘purposive,’  i.e.,  that 
there  is  some  change  of  experience  desired  and  in¬ 
tended  throughout  the  activity  as  its  goal. 

With  the  desire  often  appears  feeling  or  emotion, 
especially  if  the  response  requires  a  large  change  in 
the  energy  or  direction  of  the  existing  mental  current.4 

4  Since  an  activity  perfectly  adapted  to  its  task  might  be  perfectly 
mechanical,  and  therefore  not  only  devoid  of  emotion  but  devoid  of  con- 
sciousness  as  well,  and  since  instinctive  action  is  held  to  belong  to  the 
more  stable  and  quasi-mechanical  adaptations,  it  has  been  held  by  many 
that  it  is  not  characteristically  attended  by  emotion.  If  flight,  for  ex¬ 
ample,  is  attended  by  fear,  the  emotion  is  a  sign  not  of  adaptation  but 
of  mal-adaptation,  and  is  therefore  extraneous  to  the  instinct  itself, 
which  is  solely  concerned  with  the  efficiency  of  the  behavior.  It  sometimes 
happens  that  in  sudden  peril  an  instinctive  response  is  made  with  a 
steel-like  accuracy  and  “ presence  of  mind,”  as  if  all  powers  of  intellect 


THE  NOTION  OF  INSTINCT 


57 


But  whether  the  stimulus  arouses  emotion  or  not,  it 
always  invites  interest,  developing  various  degrees  of 
animation  and  excitement.  As  the  kitten  finds  fascina¬ 
tion  in  a  moving  string  prior  to  any  experience  with 
mice,  so  every  object  that  plays  on  instinctive  tenden¬ 
cies  seems  invested  with  an  unexplained  claim  upon 
attention.  It  has  a  seemingly  intrinsic  value,  though 
experience  discovers  that  its  value  is  derived  from  that 
something-else  whose  desire  the  stimulus  arouses,  and 
which  it  therefore  points  to,  or  ‘means.’ 

This  ‘meaning’  of  the  stimulus  is  more  or  less  vague 
and  premonitory  according  to  the  extent  of  one’s  ex¬ 
perience  with  that  particular  instinct  and  its  result. 
But  I  judge  that  a  stimulus  has  from  the  beginning 
some  anticipatory  meaning,  since  it  must  render  its 
account  to  the  mind  into  which  it  falls.  It  seems  prob¬ 
able  to  me  that  even  at  first  sight,  a  pond  of  water 
must  have  to  a  gosling  some  such  meaning:  it  is  an 

and  of  skilled  adjustment  were  heightened  in  an  emotionless  blaze  of 
supernormal  adroitness;  while  the  emotional  tremor  and  disordering  of 
function  may  supervene  1 1  after  it  is  all  over.  ’  ’ 

If  one  identifies  the  emotion  with  the  disturbance,  and  not  with  the 
state  of  heightened  faculty  itself,  it  is  certain  that  the  emotion  is  not  a 
state  of  perfect  adaptation ;  but  it  may  still  be  a  state  of  transition  from 
one  adjustment  to  another,  and  so  a  normal  attendant  of  that  change 
of  energy-flow  and  focussing  which  must  occur  at  the  onset  of  any  in¬ 
stinctive  action.  If  the  transition  is  brief,  the  emotion  will  be  equally 
brief.  But  brief  and  violent  transitions  may  mean  incomplete  organic 
preparations,  and  hence  an  excessive  prostration  after  the  heightened 
effort  is  over.  The  mental  aspect  of  the  deferred  emotion  seems  to  be  most 
pronounced  in  the  most  self-conscious,  and  to  consist  in  part  of  the 
effort  to  maintain  the  sense  of  self-identity  in  the  violently  different 
states  of  coensesthesia.  While  the  instinct  has  enabled  one  to  act  with 
supreme  immediacy  and  effect,  the  reckoning  with  self-consciousness  has 
to  come  later. 


58 


THE  NATURAL  MAN 


object,  I  imagine,  which  not  only  engages  attention,  but 
also  invites  with  dim  promises  joined  with  premonitory 
stirrings  of  nnnsed  swimming  mechanisms,  while  mak¬ 
ing  direct  appeal  to  the  waddling  abilities  already  ac¬ 
quired.  If  this  is  the  case,  instinct  on  its  conscious  side 
would  involve  an  idea-content  and  an  active-tendency 
of  an  essentially  a  priori  character, — not  an  a  priori 
knowledge  precisely,  but  an  a  priori  expectation,  involv¬ 
ing  representative  images,  however  indefinite,  not  de¬ 
rived  from  the  previous  experience  of  the  individual 
organism.  I  see  no  sufficient  reason  for  rejecting  this 
view, — a  tabula  rasa  at  birth  the  mind  certainly  is 
not.  But  however  it  may  be  at  the  first  appearance  of 
a  stimulus,  in  the  course  of  time  any  such  instinct- 
object  comes  to  mean  definitely  the  whole  instinct- 
process  and  its  end.  The  ‘  stimulus,  ’  then,  as  a  fact  of 
consciousness,  is  the  pre-perception  of  the  end  as  the 
meaning  of  the  beginning. 

Because  of  this  demand  upon  attention  and  interest, 
always  more  or  less  unexplained,  an  instinctive  impulse 
frequently  appears  as  a  stranger  in  the  house,  curi¬ 
ously  external  to  the  ‘self’  that  dwells  there.  Thus  fear 
or  anger  may  invade  a  mind  as  an  intruder  with  which 
the  self  deliberately  struggles,  in  the  name  of  reason 
or  of  principle.  In  working  out  the  issue  with  fear  of 
the  dark,  a  child  commonly  reaches  a  stage  in  which 
this  fear  is  almost  an  objective  phenomenon  within 
himself,  and  may  be  personified  as  an  enemy  to  be  over¬ 
come.  The  instinct  with  an  impetus  and  course  so  much 
its  own  (as  if  constituting  a  separate  self  in  a  minor 
way)  is  indeed  something  other  than  the  pre-existing 


THE  NOTION  OF  INSTINCT 


59 


self.  Regarded  from  the  standpoint  of  biological  wis¬ 
dom,  the  instinct  in  making  for  results  favorable  to  the  • 
species  has  been  interpreted  as  the  representative  of 
the  race  at  work  within  the  individual.5  Now  it  is  cer¬ 
tain  that  so  long  as  my  mind  remains  mine,  I  can  be 
lured  into  working  out  the  weal  of  the  species,  before 
I  understand  that  weal,  only  if  the  end-situation  has  in 
it  something  which  my  individual  self  also  can  value : 
the  purposiveness  of  instinct  must  be  primarily  pur¬ 
posiveness  for  the  individual.  But  it  may  well  be  that 
the  value-for-me  which  invites  the  self  into  an  instinc¬ 
tive  course  is  felt  by  that  self  as  a  pretext  about  which 
obscure  and  as-yet-alien  values  are  gathered.  There  is 
an  unrevealed  more  in  its  meaning.  Hence,  perhaps,  a 
certain  dread  frequently  felt  at  the  brink  of  instinctive 
behavior,  even  when  it  presents  itself  as  a  path  of  satis¬ 
faction. 

Yet  in  this  externality  of  the  instinct — naturally 
clearest  in  the  aversions,  the  negative  instincts — there 
is  a  paradox.  It  is  in  instinctive  action  that  one  is 
most  himself.  During  the  moment  in  which  the  object 
of  perception,  the  stimulus,  may  be  purely  ‘  interest¬ 
ing,  9  the  self  stands  outside  the  instinct;  but  the  fas¬ 
cination  which  that  object  exercises,  whether  auspi¬ 
cious  or  baleful,  conveys  an  invitation  to  identify  that 
self  with  an  attractive  process  of  action.  To  yield  to 
the  invitation  is  perceived  as  a  route  of  high  satis¬ 
faction,  even  though  (as  in  anger)  there  is  involved 
an  intense  effort  and  possible  pain.  The  instinct  is  a 

5  Cf.  A.  Myerson,  The  Foundations  of  Personality,  pp.  108,  109  and 
note. 


60 


THE  NATURAE  MAN 


channel  down  which  the  current  of  life  rushes  with 
exceptional  impetus;  once  committed  to  it,  we  reach 
our  highest  pitch  of  personal  self-consciousness,  our 
greatest  sense  of  power  and  command.  The  self  be¬ 
comes  identified  with  its  major  passions :  the  experi¬ 
ence  of  passion  is  a  fateful  experience;  and  the  same 
self  emerges  as  also  not  the  same,  because  it  has  dis¬ 
covered  missing  elements  of  itself  by  the  way. 

To  resume  our  view  of  this  term,  instinct,  so  com¬ 
monly  invoked,  and  which  we  hypothetically  adopt  as  a 
unit  of  human  and  animal  nature:  As  a  physiological 
mechanism,  we  have  noted  the  orderly  and  progressive 
sequence  of  reflexes  that  compose  it,  the  contribution  of 
this  series,  as  a  whole,  to  the  vital  interests  of  the 
organism  or  species,  the  central  connection  which 
marks  its  response  as  total,  and  its  destiny  to  be  modi¬ 
fied  by  experience  and  to  become  an  individualized 
habit.  As  a  fact  of  consciousness,  we  have  described 
instinct  as  accentuating  the  interest  of  certain  objects 
of  perception,  endowing  them  with  a  meaning  to  be 
worked  out  in  a  course  of  conduct  whose  prompting  is 
the  essential  part  of  the  instinct,  giving  zest,  momen¬ 
tum,  and  assurance  to  that  course  of  conduct, — a  zest 
not  unmixed  with  the  thrill  of  dread  as  something  fate¬ 
ful  for  the  history  of  the  self,— and  leading  to  a  situa¬ 
tion  of  repose  whose  value  is  the  conscious  justifica¬ 
tion  for  the  whole  process. 

If  the  entire  human  being  is  originally  a  bundle  of 
such  instincts,  this  ‘self’  which  at  any  moment  seems 
to  be  contrasted  with  a  given  instinct  may  be  regarded 


THE  NOTION  OF  INSTINCT 


61 


as  the  representative  at  that  moment  of  all  the  other 
instincts.  I  doubt  whether  this  will  prove  to  be  a  wholly 
satisfactory  account  of  the  4  self/  but  it  may  serve  us 
for  the  present  as  a  part  of  our  working  hypothesis. 


CHAPTER  VIII 


THE  RANGE  OF  INSTINCT 

IN  forming  our  notion  of  instinct,  we  find  at  the 
same  time  the  criteria  by  which  an  instinct  is  to 
be  recognized.  To  external  observation,  the  presence 
of  an  instinct  would  be  indicated  by  the  trend  of  the 
entire  species  into  a  distinctive  mode  of  livelihood,  by 
an  untaught  skill  in  pursuing  these  characteristic  ways 
and  by  the  peculiar  organs  or  organic  contours  that 
correspond  to  them.  An  observer  would  look  also  for 
outward  signs  of  the  inner  states  which  accompany 
instinct,  for  the  expressions  of  spontaneous  interest  in 
certain  objects,  of  desire  or  aversion,  of  characteristic 
emotions,  and,  finally,  of  a  degree  of  urgency  and  in¬ 
sistence  in  the  behavior.  For  the  impeding  of  instinc¬ 
tive  behavior  in  animals  commonly  excites  first  vehe¬ 
mence  and  then  anger.  Arts  which  can  be  attributed  to 
random  action  and  the  discoveries  it  brings,  or  to  de¬ 
liberate  trial  and  error,  or  to  ingenuity,  are  in  so  far 
not  due  to  instinct,  whose  successes  are  neither  acci¬ 
dental  nor  yet  reasoned.  Effectiveness  beyond  what 
either  chance  or  the  existing  intelligence  would  account 
for  is  thus  an  important  criterion  of  instinct.  But  be¬ 
havior  which  is  both  unreasoned  and  unreasonable,  as 
being  maladapted  to  existing  conditions,  is  often 
understood  as  instinctive,  if  it  appears  a  recognizable 


THE  RANGE  OF  INSTINCT 


63 


persistence  of  dispositions  serviceable  in  savagery  or 
more  primitive  states.  To  long-continned  observation 
other  marks  may  furnish  clnes.  Thus,  since  instinctive 
action  is  an  attractive  experience,  it  is  likely  to  be  not 
alone  recurrent,  but  also  the  basis  of  play,  and,  in 
subtler  expression,  of  the  more  enduring  interests, 
bents,  and  powers,  sometimes  of  exaggeration  to  the 
point  of  mental  disorder. 

But  these  criteria  are  not  all  equally  serviceable  or 
conclusive.  For  the  most  part,  the  identification  of  an 
instinct  tends  to  rest  upon  the  simple  question  whether 
there  is  an  untaught  and  unreasoned  skill,  the  other 
marks  being  merely  corroborative.  With  these  criteria 
at  hand,  what  range  of  instinct  can  we  attribute  to 
original  human  nature  ? 

At  first  sight,  the  human  equipment  seems  compara¬ 
tively  slender.  We  have  already  referred  to  the  rela¬ 
tive  absence  of  fixed  traits  in  the  human  infant,  the 
predominance  of  random  action  rather  than  of  specific 
responses  to  specific  stimuli.  Lengthened  infancy  im¬ 
plies  lengthened  parental  guidance;  and  what  instinct 
must  do  for  less  favored  animals  it  would  better  leave 
undone  for  a  creature  whose  conduct  is  to  be  so  vari¬ 
ously  ordered  and  so  radically  experimental.  Bergson 
has  recently  reaffirmed  the  once  current  belief  that 
man,  with  the  vertebrates  generally,  has  largely  sur¬ 
rendered  instinct  in  the  interest  of  intellect.  This 
“running  to  intellect,”  i.e.,  an  innate  propensity  to 
master  vital  problems  by  dissecting  and  reconstruct¬ 
ing,  such  as  men  take  to  with  more  or  less  of  untaught 


64 


THE  NATURAL  MAN 


skill,  might  with  some  justice  be  called  the  essential 
instinct  of  man,  a  substitute  for  all  other  instincts. 
In  him,  the  vital  impetus  makes  for  curiosity,  and  for 
the  invention  of  hypotheses,  and  of  tools. 

It  is  true  that  many  observers,  from  Darwin  and 
Spencer  onward  to  Chadbourne  and  William  James, 
have  been  impressed  by  the  number  and  variety  of  in¬ 
stinct-rudiments  in  man.  But  we  are  looking  for  funda¬ 
mental  factors  in  the  building  of  a  mind,  not  for  relics 
and  fragments  of  an  admitted  animal  ancestry.  We 
wish  to  know  whether  there  are  instincts  which,  as 
McDougall  claims,  provide  the  nucleus  of  all  human 
values:  we  are  less  concerned  whether  there  are  ves¬ 
tiges  that  explain  the  peculiar  ways  in  which  we  laugh 
or  cry. 

In  animals  other  than  man,  instinct  attracts  atten¬ 
tion  partly  because  of  the  conjunction  of  apparently 
superhuman  cunning  with  subhuman  powers  of 
thought;  in  part  because  of  the  remarkable  bodily 
structures  which  accompany  them.  Man  lacks  these 
striking  organic  instruments  almost  entirely.  He  has 
no  horns,  wings,  humps,  claws,  quills,  tusks,  shell,  or 
sting.  His  body  offers  no  visible  foothold  for  notable 
functions  of  offence,  defence,  or  craftsmanship.  He 
is  a  relatively  smooth  and  unmarked  animal.  Inter¬ 
nally,  also,  his  organs  are  undistinguished.  Except  that 
he  is  obviously  neither  fish  nor  fowl,  his  structure  does 
not  mark  him  for  this  or  that  habitat  or  diet,  nor  for 
special  mastery  over  any  part  of  nature.  Physically, 
he  is,  as  nearly  as  possible,  animal-in-general. 

From  what  we  can  infer  of  primitive  psychology, 


THE  RANGE  OF  INSTINCT 


65 


something  analogous  must  be  said  of  the  inner  man. 
He  shows  no  great  native  skills  nor  passions.  He  is 
not  strikingly  social  nor  solitary,  warlike  nor  submis¬ 
sive,  benevolent  nor  selfish.  Hobbes  and  Grotius  were 
both  in  error,  the  one  in  representing  us  as  dominantly 
pugnacious,  the  other  as  dominantly  amicable.  Mon¬ 
tesquieu  showed  greater  insight.  The  natural  human 
being,  he  thought,  shows  no  conspicuous  powers, 
whether  of  loyalty,  mastery,  or  achievement,  interested 
nr  disinterested.  Sufficient  evidence  of  this  may  he  the 
wide  disagreements  of  those  who  have  ventured  to 
draw  up  lists  of  the  principal  instincts.  Apart  from 
fear,  hunger,  pugnacity,  and  love,  few  names  com¬ 
monly  recur  in  such  lists ;  and  none  of  these  can  show 
a  wholly  undisputed  title.  Thus,  psychically  also,  we 
;seem  to  be  dealing  with  a  generalized  creature,  not 
with  one  specified  in  character  by  many  instinctive 
traits. 

But  there  are  reasons  why  in  the  case  of  the  human 
being,  the  coarser  criteria  of  instinct  may  not  at  once 
reveal  what  is  there.  Three  such  reasons  occur  to  me : 

1.  The  balance  of  instincts.  If  any  organ  or  function 
is  inconspicuous,  it  is  always  possible  that  it  does  not 
exist,  and  this  is  no  doubt  the  most  obvious  sup¬ 
position.  But  it  is  also  possible  that  supplementary 
organs  or  functions  have  grown  up  beside  it,  balancing 
its  action,  and  tending  to  conceal  it.  So  far  as  human 
instincts  are  concerned,  the  latter  supposition  seems 
the  true  one.  Anatomically,  it  is  the  balance  of  powers 
rather  than  the  lack  of  them  that  distinguishes  the 
human  type.  The  erect  posture,  for  instance,  implies 


66 


THE  NATURAL  MAN 


not  the  lack  of  a  ventral  musculature,  but  rather  the 
growth  of  an  equivalent  dorsal  musculature.  Likewise 
with  the  instincts.  If  no  one  impulse  is  dominant  in 
human  behavior,  it  is  not  because  the  impulses  are 
lacking,  but  because  in  any  situation  two  or  more  im¬ 
pulses  are  likely  to  be  concerned.  Man  is  not  fated  to 
predation,  nor  yet  to  a  life  of  fear  and  flight.  It  is  not 
prescribed  by  nature  that  he  should  live  in  immense 
herds,  nor  in  mutually  repellent  families,  nor  alone. 
Yet  impulses  in  all  these  directions  are  present  in  him, 
and  he  is  the  field  of  their  conflict  and  adjustment. 

2.  Variety  of  pattern .  For  the  sake  of  simplicity 
we  commonly  picture  the  physiological  pattern  of  an 
instinct  as  a  triple  arrangement  of  sense-stimulus, 
central  adjustment,  and  muscular  response, — for  each 
instinct  a  complete  individual  set  of  these  three  parts. 
And  where  an  instinct  conforms  to  this  simple  design, 
following  a  path  of  its  own  and  using  a  specialized 
group  of  muscles  as  in  eating,  vocalization,  locomotion, 
it  will  hardly  escape  detection.  But  few  of  our  instincts 
have  such  clear-cut  rights-of-way:  for  some  of  them 
few  muscles  or  none  are  set  apart.  Thus,  fear-and- 
flight  and  anger-and-combat  are  highly  contrasting 
impulses :  but  they  arise  from  similar  stimuli,  and  the 
muscles  as  well  as  the  visceral  changes  involved  in  one 
largely  coincide  with  those  involved  in  the  other.  To 
instincts  of  this  pattern,  structure  will  furnish  no  defi¬ 
nite  clue. 

And  there  is,  unless  I  am  much  mistaken,  a  still 
more  obscure  pattern, — one  in  which  the  muscular 
changes  involved  are  variable,  and  in  some  cases  com- 


THE  RANGE  OF  INSTINCT 


67 


paratively  unimportant,  because  the  function  of  the 
instinct  is  to  effect  adjustments  within  the  nervous 
system.  If  there  is  an  instinctive  basis  for  aesthetic 
values,  for  example,  it  is  probably  of  this  pattern; 
surely  there  is  no  typical  series  of  muscular  events 
which  can  be  said  to  be  characteristic  of  our  response 
to  beauty !  An  investigator  whose  eye  is  fixed  upon  the 
pattern  of  sensible  stimulus  and  determinate  muscular 
response  will  be  inclined  to  deny  the  existence  of  such 
instincts;  but  we  cannot  so  dogmatically  close  the 
question. 

3.  Coalescence  of  instincts.  There  is  a  tendency 
among  instincts  of  all  but  the  simplest  patterns,  not 
alone  to  share  in  the  tracts  of  physical  expression  (as 
above),  but  also  to  participate  in  the  satisfactions  one 
of  another,  vicariously.  Are  we  prepared  to  say,  for 
instance,  that  a  successful  wooing  provides  satisfac¬ 
tion  for  the  mating  instinct,  but  none  for  the  instinct 
of  acquisition  (if  there  is  such)  or  of  self-assertion 
(if  there  is  such),  or,  for  that  matter,  of  self-abase¬ 
ment?  If  not,  we  must  acknowledge  that  no  enumera¬ 
tion  of  instincts  in  which  one  is  supposed  to  be  wholly 
different  from  the  other  in  clean-cut  division,  is  likely 
to  do  justice  to  the  actual  situation. 

When  these  sources  of  possible  error  are  borne  in 
mind,  it  will  appear,  I  believe,  that  the  human  equip¬ 
ment  of  instinct  is  by  no  means  a  meager  one.  We  shall 
now  endeavor  to  make  a  rough  survey  of  it. 


CHAPTER  IX 


SURVEY  OF  THE  HUMAN  EQUIPMENT 

FIRST,  there  are  numerous  clear-cut  instincts  of 
simple  pattern  which  we  may  call  6  units  of  be¬ 
havior,  *  because  they  are  used  in  various  combinations. 
In  the  human  economy  not  alone  are  there  few  muscles 
that  are  used  for  only  one  achievement:  there  are  few 
of  the  simpler  instincts  which  appear  in  only  one  vital 
function.  The  operations  of  reaching,  grasping,  pull¬ 
ing,  shaking,  are  such  units.  They  are  sometimes 
referred  to  jointly  as  an  instinct  of  prehension.  But 
evidently  there  are  few  of  the  major  instincts  into 
whose  course  they  do  not  enter,  as  in  the  beginnings  of 
locomotion,  in  climbing,  food-getting,  curiosity,  love, 
pugnacity.  It  is  as  if  in  man  the  elaborate  instincts  of 
his  animal  forbears  had  been  broken  into  fragments, 
or  analyzed  after  the  manner  of  human  intelligence 
itself,  in  order  that  duplication  might  be  avoided,  and 
new  possibilites  of  combining  realized.  Instead  of  a 
one-piece  instinct  of  locomotion,  we  have  many  partial 
instincts  which  further  the  co-operation  of  various 
groups  of  muscles  in  the  numerous  postures  of  which 
the  body  is  capable,  in  crawling,  standing,  walking, 
running,  climbing.  Doubtless  many  of  these  innate 
connections  have  yet  to  be  isolated :  no  one  knows  what 
instinctive  hints  and  guidance  may  come  to  the  aid 
of  the  first  leap  or  of  the  first  dodge  or  fall.  Food- 


SURVEY  OF  THE  HUMAN  EQUIPMENT  69 

getting  when  it  reaches  the  month  becomes  almost  a 
specific  instinct,  though  sucking,  biting,  chewing  have 
a  degree  of  separability,  and  so  of  other  employment. 
The  tendency  of  all  careful  study  of  instincts,  guided 
by  the  formula  of  sense-stimulus  and  specific  response, 
is  to  fragmentize  in  this  manner  the  older  instinct 
categories.  “Curiosity”  disappears  in  a  group  of  in¬ 
stinctive  movements  of  attention  and  of  manipulation 
such  as  we  mentioned  above.  The  result  is  an  elaborate 
gamut  of  units  of  behavior.1 

Some  writers  decline  to  include  these  units  of  be¬ 
havior  among  the  instincts  on  the  ground  that  they 
approximate  too  closely  simple  reflexes,  that  they  are 
not  adaptive  in  any  significant  sense  when  taken  sever¬ 
ally,  and  that  there  is  no  distinctive  emotion  or  affective 
coloring  associated  with  their  exercise.2  That  may  be 
left  as  a  question  of  nomenclature,  with  the  remark 
that  these  simple  dispositions  cannot  be  omitted  from 
the  account  of  our  inheritance,  as  they  are  most  evi¬ 
dently  not  acquired.3 

To  some  other  writers,  these  units  of  behavior  are, 
strictly  speaking,  the  only  true  instincts.  The  wider 
categories,  curiosity,  hunger,  etc.,  these  writers  be¬ 
lieve  should  be  recognized  either  as  convenient  and 
misleading  class-names,  representing  no  real  unitary 
instinct  or,  if  they  describe  actual  dispositions,  as  ac¬ 
quired  habits  of  reaction  built  up  by  incorporating 

1  See  the  lists  of  James  and  Thorndike  noticed  on  pages  76-79. 

2  W.  McDougall,  Outline  of  Psychology,  p.  117. 

3  They  are  accepted  as  innate  by  some  who  otherwise  disparage  the 
use  of  the  concept  of  instinct.  Cf.  Z.  Y.  Kuo,  Journal  of  Philosophy, 
Nov.  24,  1921,  p.  658. 


70 


THE  NATURAL  MAN 


many  of  these  units  into  compound  patterns  shaped  by 
experience  and  training.4  It  is  not  evident,  however, 
why  a  combination  of  such  units  to  a  single  serviceable 
end  might  not  be  prearranged  by  nature  quite  as  truly 
as  the  units  themselves.  It  is  a  question  of  fact,  not  of 
nomenclature,  whether  such  more  inclusive  instincts 
exist,  i.e.,  whether  such  dispositions  as  pugnacity, 
sociability,  food-getting,  are  an  integral  part  of  our 
heredity,  as  well  as  the  simple  motor-mechanisms  which 
they  employ.  Flight,  for  example,  under  the  impulse 
of  fear,  seems  a  thoroughly  instinctive  performance, 
making  use  with  untaught  skill  of  many  units  of  be¬ 
havior.  It  is  noteworthy  also  that  the  order  and  variety 
of  these  units  is  not  fixed:  the  end-situation  to  be 
brought  about  by  flight  is  describable  only  in  general 
terms,  as  well  as  the  means  of  reaching  it.  The  end  is 
to  get  away;  and  it  is  a  secondary  matter  what  place 
I  reach,  or  whether  I  run  away,  creep  away,  or  climb 
away.  I  should  recognize  flight  as  a  genuine  instinct, 
identified  by  its  vital  meaning  or  end  and  by  the  gen¬ 
eral  character  of  the  process.  And  since  both  the  end 
and  the  process  are  to  be  described  in  general  rather 
than  specific  terms,  this  instinct  might  be  called  a  gen¬ 
eral  instinct.  Most  of  the  traditional  instincts  are  gen¬ 
eral  in  this  sense.  Fear,  which  names  an  emotion  rather 
than  an  instinct,  expresses  itself  not  alone  in  flight 
but  in  contraction,  concealment,  rigid  immobility,  or 

4  A  similar  problem  arises  in  the  outlining  of  species.  “In  a  handful 
of  small  shells  the  ‘splitters’  may  recognize  20  species,  while  the 
‘slumpers’  see  only  3.  Thus  Haeckel  says  of  calcareous  sponges  that, 
as  the  naturalist  likes  to  look  at  the  problem,  there  are  3  species,  or  21, 
or  289,  or  591.”  Thomson,  Outlines  of  Zoology,  p.  14. 


SUKVEY  OF  THE  HUMAN  EQUIPMENT  71 

heightened  adroitness.  Yet  it  also  has  a  definable  end; 
and  its  unity  seems  further  guaranteed  by  its  genetic 
position  at  the  head  of  a  group  of  defensive  reactions. 
I  should  recognize  fear  as  the  (rather  inaccurate)  name 
of  an  instinct  of  high  generality.5 

It  is  among  these  general  instincts  that  the  tendency 
of  the  human  equipment  toward  balance  is  most  readily 
recognized.  Some  of  the  units  of  behavior  are  paired, 
as  pulling  and  pushing,  taking  into  the  mouth  and 
spitting  out,  laughing  and  weeping;  many  again  have 
no  specific  counterparts.  But  the  general  instincts  fall 
naturally  into  pairs,  as  follows:  instinct  to  general 
physical  activity  and  instinct  to  repose  (including  the 
various  modes  of  rest  and  sleep  as  units  of  behavior)  f 
curiosity  and  aversion  to  novelty ;  sociability  and  anti¬ 
sociability.  This  last  named  pair  is  itself  highly  gen¬ 
eral,  including  within  itself  such  instincts,  also  general, 
as  those  of  dominance  and  submission,  sex-love  and 
sex-aversion,  and  parental  love, — which  seems  to  have 

6  Lloyd  Morgan  recognizes  ( Scientia ,  October,  1920)  three  levels  of 
instinct:  simple  motor  tendencies,  mid-level  instincts,  and  high-level  in¬ 
stincts.  The  latter  two  levels  correspond  to  our  general  instincts,  the 
“ high-level  instincts”  (self-preservation  and  race-maintenance)  being 
tendencies  of  high  generality.  I  should  raise  the  question  of  fact,  es¬ 
pecially  in  regard  to  race-maintenance,  but  I  am  glad  for  this  confirma¬ 
tion  of  the  existence  of  the  general  instinct. 

e  In  the  first  edition  of  this  book,  it  was  with  much  hesitancy  that  I 
included  these  instincts  to  general  physical  arousal  and  repose-seeking: 
in  the  tabular  survey,  p.  56,  I  marked  them  with  a  query.  I  was  inclined 
to  include  them  because  the  ways  of  making  these  transitions  in  activity 
and  alertness,  affecting  the  set  of  all  other  instincts,  are  highly  charac¬ 
teristic  of  animal  species.  Since  then,  I  have  been  confirmed  in  this  judg¬ 
ment  by  observations  of  Szymanski,  Claparede  and  McDougall  ( Outline 
of  Psychology,  p.  165  n.).  W.  H.  E.  Ewers’  tl instinct  of  collapse” 
would  seem  to  me  to  belong  also  in  this  place. 


i 


72 


THE  NATURAL  MAN 


no  more  express  counterpart  than  a  repugnance  to 
children,  which  in  most  persons  is  a  submerged  trait. 

It  is  possible  that  all  of  these  instincts  are  derived, 
as  Gr.  H.  Schneider  thinks,  from  a  pair  of  primitive 
reactions,  expansive  and  contractive  in  nature.  I 
should,  in  fact,  be  inclined  to  group  all  the  assertive 
and  outgoing  instincts  under  one  highly  general  in¬ 
stinct  of  activity,  or  expansion,  and  all  the  negative 
instincts  under  a  highly  general  instinct  of  retraction 
or  aversion.  Pugnacity  would  be  a  general  instinct, 
comparatively  late  in  development,  uniting  in  itself  the 
qualities  of  aversion  and  expansion.  The  most  primitive 
reaction  to  opposition  is  contraction,  withdrawal, 
‘fear’:  nature’s  second  thought  is  that  a  reserve  of 
energy  may  be  devoted  to  remove  the  obstacle — and 
here  pugnacity,  with  its  own  characteristic  units  of 
behavior,  enters  the  scene. 

In  speaking  of  pugnacity,  however,  we  touch  upon 
a  highly  interesting  development  in  the  system  of 
instincts.  In  a  wider  sense  of  the  word  pugnacity,  it 
may  be  said  that  every  instinct  is  pugnacious ;  that  is, 
it  is  characteristic  of  instinctive  action  of  all  sorts, 
even  of  fear,  to  meet  opposition  with  irritation  and  an 
increased  appropriation  of  energy.  Professor  William 
McDougall  has  made  this  fact  the  defining  character  of 
anger  and  the  instinct  of  pugnacity.  That  quality  of 
spiritedness  which  makes  an  obstacle  a  spur  rather 
than  a  discouragement  is  unquestionably  a  more  gen¬ 
eral  form  of  the  fighting  instinct.  But  the  point  of  par¬ 
ticular  interest  in  this  wider  form  of  pugnacity  is  that 


SUKVEY  OF  THE  HUMAN  EQUIPMENT  73 

it  is  an  instinctive  control  of  instinct,  an  instinct  of  the 
second  order.  There  are  other  aspects  of  the  instinctive 
regulation  of  the  course  of  instincts.  Play  is  a  lighten¬ 
ing  of  the  instinct-pressure,  so  to  speak,  under  control 
of  sociability ;  as  pugnacity  is  an  enhancement  of  pres¬ 
sure,  under  control  of  anti-sociability.7  Every  instinct 
may  be  expressed  playfully  as  well  as  pugnaciously; 
and  the  preponderance  of  one  or  the  other  of  these  tend¬ 
encies  of  the  second  order  marks  the  difference  in  tem¬ 
perament  between  the  gay  and  the  serious-minded.  It 
may  also  be  said  that  every  instinct  is  curious,  for 
every  instinct,  in  man  at  any  rate,  tends  to  lend  inter¬ 
est  to  objects  in  any  way  bearing  upon  its  own  opera¬ 
tion;  or,  conversely,  curiosity  may  be  regarded  as  a 
function  of  control  or  guidance  applicable  generally  to 
instincts  of  the  first  order.  Curiosity  as  an  appendage 
of  food-getting,  construction,  sociability,  etc.,  doubt¬ 
less  precedes  in  order  of  development  the  curiosity 
which  appears  as  an  independent  hunger  of  the  mind. 

This  latter  kind  of  curiosity  is  typical  of  that  impor¬ 
tant  group  of  general  instincts  which  in  our  last  chapter 
we  spoke  of  as  central.  These  introduce  a  question  so 
critical  for  our  theory  of  instinct  that  we  treat  of  it  in 
a  separate  chapter.  It  will  be  in  place  here  to  throw 
into  rough  tabular  form  the  survey  so  far  as  completed, 
while  recognizing  the  impossibility  of  representing  in 

7  Play  and  pugnacity,  in  this  regulative  capacity,  furnish  another 
instance  of  balance,  and  we  frequently  find  them  alternating.  But 
their  relation  is  not  simply  that  of  contrast  and  balance.  As  instincts 
of  the  second  order,  the  domain  of  each  includes  the  other,  i.e.,  we 
often  play  at  pugnacity,  and  are  sometimes  pugnacious  in  the  pursuit 
of  play. 


SURVEY  OF  THE  HUMAN  INSTINCTS 


POSITIVE  (Expansive) 

NEGATIVE  (Contractive) 

Aggressive 

i  Defensive 

i 

Instinct  to  Physical  Activity1 

Stretching 
Rubbing  Eyes ,  etc. 


Prehension 

Grasping 
Reaching,  Pulling 
Shaking,  etc. 

Locomotion  . 

Standing,  Crawling 
JV dicing,  Running  yf 
Climbing,  etc. 

Food -Getting 

Sucking,  Swalloiving 
Carrying/fo  Mouth 
Biting,  eh\j 

Huntin 
Rovi 

Acquisition  (?) 

Construction  (?) 

Stoker-making  (vestigial) 

Curiosity  (primitive) 

Movements  qf  A  ttendfcgl 
Manipulating,  etc. 


4 


—destruction  ( ?) 


0 

Sociability 


Vocalization 
Imitative  Acts 
Gregarious  Behavior 
Etc. 


Domination 

Display,  etc. 

Sex -Love 

Courting,  Copulation 
Home-making  (?) 

Parental  Love 

Nursing,  etc. 

Attachment  to  Parent 


> 


4 


Instinct  to  Inactivity 

Preparation  for  Repose, 
Sleep,  Death 

Fear  (primitive) 


4 


Pushing  Away 


A 


A 


*ood  Aversion 


S^ttin jg  Out 


Averting  Head 


-Protective  (extension  of  parental  ?) 

I  A  version  to  Blood 

I 
I 
I 


.version  to  Novelty 
I 
I 
I 
I 

Anti-Sociability 

i 


Contrast  Acts 


Pugnacity  (primitive)  J 


Shyness 

SecretivCness 

Submission 

Bending,  etc. 


Sex-Aversion 

Rejection  of  Contact  \ 

I 

I 


Shame 


Aversion  to  Children  (?) 

I 

I 

I 


NOTE. 


Instincts  of  second  order  written  across  page.  Units  of  behavior  in  Italics. 
Indentation  indicates  degree  of  generality ,  not  genetic  priority. 


SURVEY  OF  THE  HUMAN  EQUIPMENT  75 

two  dimensions — or  any  other  number — the  relations 
between  psycho-physical  entities  of  this  kind. 

Note.  For  comparison  I  append  several  lists  of  instincts: 

P.  A.  Chadbourne,  writing  in  1872,  was  one  of  the  earliest  in 
this  country  to  give  attention  to  instinct  in  man.  William 
J ames  was  influenced  to  some  extent  by  his  work.  His  attitude 
is  modern  in  one  respect  at  least :  instead  of  arguing  from  the 
inadequacy  of  instinct  to  the  necessity  of  reason  in  man,  he 
argues  from  the  incompetence  of  reason  to  the  necessity  of 
instinct.  Because  reason,  in  the  following  respects,  is  unable 
to  adapt  man  to  his  world,  a  group  of  instincts  is  needed  at 
each  point : 

1.  For  the  life  of  the  individual  and  the  species,  a  set  of 

instincts  common  to  man  and  animals,  and  suffi¬ 
ciently  designated  as  ‘  appetites.  ’ 

2.  For  progress  of  the  individual  and  the  race : 

The  desire  for  society ; 

The  desire  for  knowledge,  property,  power,  esteem; 

The  impulse  to  confide  in  persons,  or  faith ; 

The  disposition  to  do  for  posterity. 

3.  For  benevolence  (i.e.,  for  maintaining  the  social  and 

moral  life)  : 

The  sense  of  obligation.  “It  is  plain  that  we  feel 
under  obligation  to  do  certain  acts  for  the  doing  of 
which  we  can  give  no  reason  except  that  we  feel 
the  obligation.  ’  ’  Shown  in  four  ways : 

1.  Impelling  to  choose  the  end  for  which  we  are 

made ; 

2.  Impelling  to  every  act  judged  as  means  to  that 

end; 

3.  Impelling  to  certain  acts  whose  relation  to  that 

end  is  not  seen ; 

4.  Impelling  the  “comprehending  power”  to  do  its 

best  to  furnish  the  most  favorable  conditions  for 

realizing  our  obligation. 


76 


THE  NATURAL  MAN 


4.  For  religion  (i.e.,  for  adaptation  to  supernatural  en¬ 
vironment)  : 

The  impulse  to  prayer,  etc. 

William  James,  writing  in  1890,  gives  a  list  based  largely 
on  Preyer  and  G.  H.  Schneider,  remarking  of  it  that  “no  other 
mammal,  not  even  the  monkey,  shows  so  large  an  array.  ’  ’  Ap¬ 
proximately  the  first  twenty  correspond  with  our  ‘units  of 
behavior. ’ 

Sucking. 

Biting. 

Chewing  and  grinding  teeth. 

Licking. 

Grimacing. 

Spitting  out. 

Clasping. 

Reaching  toward. 

Pointing  (and  sounding). 

Carrying  to  mouth. 

Crying. 

Smiling. 

Protruding  lips. 

Turning  head  aside. 

Holding  head  erect. 

Sitting  up. 

Standing. 

Locomotion. 

Climbing. 

In  making  his  list,  James  was  guided  by  a  method  of  “physio¬ 
logical  analysis,’ ’  and  he  regarded  his  results,  though  con¬ 
fessedly  incomplete,  as  having  clear  advantages  over  such  a 
“muddled  list”  as  that  of  Santlus  (Leipzig,  1864),  who  had 
classified  human  instincts  under  three  heads, — instincts  of 
being,  of  function,  and  of  life. 

Professor  William  McDougall  allows  the  name  of  instinct 


Vocalization. 

Imitation. 

Emulation  or  rivalry. 
Pugnacity,  anger,  resentment. 
Sympathy. 

The  hunting  instinct. 

Fear. 

Acquisition. 

Constructiveness. 

Play. 

Curiosity. 

Sociability  and  shyness. 
Secretiveness. 

Cleanliness. 

Modesty,  shame. 

Love. 

J  ealousy. 

Parental  love. 


STJBVEY  OF  THE  HUMAN  EQUIPMENT  77 

only  to  what  we  have  called  general  instincts,  holding  that 
while  an  instinct  “may  make  use  at  need  of  a  large  array  of 
motor  mechanisms”  it  may  employ  differently  such  units  on 
different  occasions  and  hence  “does  not  essentially  comprise 
in  its  organization  any  motor  mechanism”  ( Journal  of  Ab¬ 
normal  Psychology ,  1921-22,  p.  311).  An  instinct  must  be  de¬ 
fined  by  the  nature  of  its  goal,  i.e.,  the  change  of  situation 
which  it  tends  to  bring  about:  its  essence  is  the  purposive 
striving  toward  this  goal.  On  these  grounds  McDougall  recog¬ 
nizes  ( Outline  of  Psychology ,  1923)  thirteen  instincts,  as 
follows : 

Parental  or  protective  instinct. 

Instinct  of  combat. 

Curiosity. 

Food-seeking. 

Instinct  of  avoidance,  repulsion,  or  disgust. 

Instinct  of  escape. 

Gregariousness. 

Self-assertion. 

Submission. 

Mating  instinct. 

Acquisitive  instinct. 

Constructive  instinct. 

Instinct  of  appeal. 

In  addition  to  these,  McDougall  recognizes  certain  minor  and 
specific  instincts  (sneezing,  coughing,  scratching,  excretion, 
laughing)  approximating  reflexes,  but  not  serving  as  units  of 
behavior  in  other  instincts,  and  also  suggestibility,  imitation, 
and  sympathy,  as  innate  tendencies  of  a  different  pattern. 

The  most  discriminating  inventory  is  that  of  Professor  E.  L. 
Thorndike,  in  The  Original  Nature  of  Man ,  1913.  Thorndike 
is  as  much  of  a  “splitter”  as  McDougall  is  a  “slumper.”  This 
is  the  inevitable  consequence  of  his  attempt  to  apply  consist¬ 
ently  the  scheme  of  stimulus-response.  It  would  be  imprac- 


78 


THE  NATURAL  MAN 


ticable  to  reproduce  here  the  net  result  of  his  painstaking 
studies  in  the  form  of  a  list,  and  also  somewhat  unfair,  as  he 
regards  the  list  as  decidedly  provisional. 

But  a  specimen  of  his  reducing  process  may  be  given.  To 
recognize  groups  of  instincts  resulting  in  food-getting,  habi¬ 
tation,  fear,  fighting,  anger,  is  a  matter  of  convenience,  not 
of  strictly  scientific  relationship.  When  named  by  situation 
and  response,  the  following  innate  connections,  among  others, 
may  be  regarded  as  probable  : 


Situation 

Eating 

Sweet  taste. 

Bitter  taste. 

Yery  sour,  salt,  acrid,  bit¬ 
ter,  oily  objects. 

Food  when  satiated. 

Beaching. 

Not  being  closely  cuddled 
(in  young  infants). 

An  object  attended  to  and 
approximately  within  reach¬ 
ing  distance. 

An  attractive  object  seen. 

Acquisition  and  possession. 

Any  not  too  large  object 
which  attracts  attention  and 
does  not  possess  repelling  or 
frightening  features. 
Possession  of  object  grasped. 


Response 

Sucking  movements. 
Separating  posterior  por¬ 
tions  of  tongue  and  palate. 

Spitting  and  letting  drool 
out  of  the  mouth. 

Turning  head  to  one  side. 


Reaching  and  clutching. 

Reaching,  maintaining  ex¬ 
tension  until  object  is  grasped. 

Reaching  and  pointing, 
often  with  ‘a  peculiar  sound 
expressive  of  desire.’ 

Approach,  or  if  within 
reaching  distance,  reaching, 
touching,  and  grasping. 

Putting  in  mouth,  or  gen¬ 
eral  manipulation,  or  both. 


SURVEY  OF  THE  HUMAN  EQUIPMENT 


79 


A  person  or  animal  grab¬ 
bing  or  making  off  with  an 
object  which  one  holds  or  has 
near  him  as  a  result  of  recent 
action  of  the  responses  of 
acquisition. 


The  neural  action  parallel¬ 
ing  the  primitive  emotion  of 
anger,  a  tight  clutch  on  the 
object,  and  pushing,  striking, 
and  screaming  at  the  in¬ 
truder.8 


s  The  Original  Nature  of  Man,  pp.  50-52. 


CHAPTER  X 


THE  CENTRAL  INSTINCTS :  NECESSARY  INTERESTS 

WE  have  had  several  occasions  to  refer  to  the 
place  of  cariosity  in  the  group  of  human  in¬ 
stincts.  However  large  the  difference  among  men  in  the 
degree  of  their  inquisitiveness,  this  trait  is  evidently 
in  some  degree  a  native  character  of  the  species,  in 
both  sexes.  It  shows  itself  in  certain  units  of  behavior 
of  the  simplest  pattern,  such  as  grasping,  tasting,  pull¬ 
ing  to  pieces.  It  bears  an  evident  proportion  to  other 
instincts:  wherever  animals  are  scantily  armed  and 
slightly  pugnacious,  there  is  generally  a  compensating 
development  of  fear  or  curiosity,  or  of  both,  as  in  the 
timorous  and  yet  inquisitive  herbivora.  These  tenden¬ 
cies,  whether  in  animals  or  in  men,  to  spy  out,  examine, 
test,  dissect,  appear  to  be  untaught,  effective,  and 
frequently  absorbing.  Sometimes  they  reach  morbid 
intensity  and  become  a  “questioning  mania,”  or  “Gru- 
belsucht.”  Thus  there  are  substantial  reasons  for  in¬ 
cluding  curiosity  among  the  instincts. 

If  it  still  seems  anomalous  to  find  the  activity  of 
intellect,  customarily  contrasted  with  instinct,  brought 
within  that  category,  we  may  remember  that  while  the 
intellect  finds  reasons  (which  are  certainly  something 
else  than  instinct),  it  does  not  begin  by  asking  the 
reason  for  finding  reasons.  The  motive  or  value  of  its 


NECESSARY  INTERESTS 


81 


own  activity  is,  during  that  activity,  unreasoned  and 
untaught.  The  exercise  of  thought,  as  has  often  been 
remarked,  is  a  matter  of  our  impulsive  nature;  and  it 
is  the  underlying  craving  for  action,  rather  than  the 
particular  type  of  activity,  that  primarily  betokens  the 
instinct. 

Yet  if  we  ask  what  we  should  regard  as  the  ‘  stimu¬ 
lus’  in  the  case  of  curiosity,  we  find  it  impossible  to 
bring  it  under  the  usual  reflex  scheme.  “  There  is  no 
one  class  of  objects,”  McDougall  points  out,  “to  which 
it  is  especially  directed,  or  in  presence  of  which  it  is 
invariably  displayed.  ’ n  Curiosity  is,  commonly  excited  £ 
by  what  is  novel;  and  what  is  novel  is  relative  to  the 
previous  experience  of  the  individual  in  question.  The 
idea  of  a  ‘  stimulus ’  as  a  group  of  sensations  that  when 
repeated  will  invariably  excite  the  given  behavior  is 
thus  excluded  in  advance, — the  conditions  for  exciting 
curiosity  negate  the  very  definition  of  a  stimulus.  Curi¬ 
osity  is  also  frequently  aroused  by  signs  of  concealment 
or  stealth  in  others ;  but  try  to  express  concealment  or 
stealth  in  terms  of  a  constant  group  of  sense-impres¬ 
sions,  and  one  forcibly  realizes  that  these  are  objects, 
not  of  vision,  but  of  interpretation  in  terms  of  social 
consciousness. 

And  if  we  ask  what  we  should  regard  as  the  ‘re¬ 
sponse,’  we  find  a  similar  difficulty.  Curiosity  has  its 
manifestations  in  physical  behavior  like  any  other  in¬ 
stinct;  but  the  behavior  is  now  of  one  kind  and  now 
of  another, — listening,  peeking,  testing  with  hands  and 


i  Body  and  Mind,  p.  266. 


82 


THE  NATURAL  MAN 


mouth,  pulling  apart,  smelling,  shaking,  tiptoeing  and 
creeping  up  upon,  or  later,  reading,  asking  questions, 
‘  stopping  to  think,  ’ — there  is  no  one-to-one  correspond¬ 
ence  between  the  impulse  of  curiosity  and  any  type  of 
physical  action. 

This  does  not  mean  either  that  we  are  dealing  with 
a  multitude  of  fragmentary  instincts,  or  yet,  as  Mc- 
Dougall  infers,  that  we  are  dealing  with  a  purely  psy¬ 
chical  process  wThich  has  no  complete  physiological  ex¬ 
pression.  What  it  does  mean,  I  suggest,  is  that  we  must 
recognize  a  kind  of  process  in  which  the  ‘stimulus’  as 
well  as  the  ‘response’  are  primarily  central.  It  is 
the  existing  state  of  consciousness  which  determines 
whether,  and  in  what  quarter,  curiosity  shall  be 
aroused,  and  what  constitutes  its  satisfaction.  In  physio¬ 
logical  terms,  curiosity  is  a  function  of  the  condition 
of  the  centers.  It  has  analogies  to  hunger  or  appetence ; 
but  the  basis  of  this  particular  craving  is  not  visceral, 
nor  reported  to  the  brain  in  a  stream  of  sensations  by 
way  of  the  afferent  nerves.  Though  typical  external 
puzzles — such  as  unusual  behavior,  situations  exploited 
in  mystery  and  detective  stories,  challenging  problems 
and  ‘projects’ — may  provide  the  strain  characteristic 
of  curiosity,  the  readiness  and  restlessness  thus 
aroused  are  conditions  of  the  brain  itself ;  the  hunger 
to  know  is  especially  keen  in  the  maturing  brain. 

It  seems  probable  that  there  is  a  group  of  tendencies, 
quite  as  native  as  any  modes  of  muscular  behavior, 
which,  like  curiosity,  have  their  inception  and  do  their 
work  within  the  higher  nervous  centers.  If  certain  cen¬ 
tral  conditions  are  natively  unsatisfactory  and  certain 


NECESSARY  INTERESTS 


83 


others  natively  satisfactory  (which  can  hardly  be 
doubted),  it  is  a  question  of  organization  whether  there 
will  also  be  native  ways  of  bringing  about  a  change 
from  the  former  to  the  latter  of  these  conditions. 
Whether  we  extend  the  word  instinct  to  them,  in  view 
of  their  deviation  from  the  primary  pattern,  is  a  matter 
of  choice  in  definition.  In  their  case,  the  term  instinct 
becomes  strained,  and  we  reach  the  border  of  its  use¬ 
fulness  in  describing  original  human  nature.  It  is  justi¬ 
fied  in  so  far  as  these  tendencies  are  innate  rather  than 
acquired,  and  are  universally  distributed.  It  is  mislead¬ 
ing  in  so  far  as  their  whole  process  differs  profoundly 
from  the  reflex  type.  If  the  term  instinct  is  to  be  re¬ 
tained,  they  should  be  distinguished  as  ‘  central  in¬ 
stincts.’  Or,  since  they  would  depend  in  the  first  place 
not  on  specific  routing  of  nervous  energy,  but  on  the 
nature  of  the  nervous  system  itself,  the  needs  in  ques¬ 
tion  would  presumably  be  the  same  in  kind  though  not 
in  degree  for  every  animal  having  a  nervous  system; 
and  it  would  be  proper  to  speak  of  them  as  ‘necessary 
interests. ,2 

That  this  theory  may  be  of  some  use  in  explaining 
our  aesthetic  tendencies,  we  have  already  suggested. 
Consider  the  universal  tendency  to  rhythmic  expres- 

2  Note  that  the  necessity  of  these  interests  is  here  described  not  as 
a  logical  but  as  a  constitutional  necessity.  This  necessity  depends  solely 
on  what  modes  of  central  nervous  operation  are  satisfactory  modes, 
from  the  standpoint  of  the  functions  of  the  central  nervous  system.  It 
is  thus  a  fundamentally  different  kind  of  ‘necessary  interest’  from  that 
which  Professor  R.  B.  Perry  recognizes  in  the  satisfaction  of  interests 
generally:  this  latter  is  a  logically  necessary  interest,  i.e.,  for  a  mind 
sufficiently  reflective  to  make  a  class  of  its  own  interests. 


84 


THE  NATURAL  MAN 


sion,  as  in  dancing,  music,  design,  various  forms  of 
play.  There  are  many  signs  that  the  appreciation  of 
rhythm  is  as  necessary  a  consequence  of  the  economy 
of  nervous  functions,  as  rhythmic  behavior  is  of  the 
economy  of  muscular  function,  of  respiratory  function, 
etc.  When  we  want  to  gain  the  full  flavor  of  any  sense- 
impression,  we  repeat  it  at  intervals,  as  in  tasting, 
stroking,  feeling  textures,  etc.  So,  too,  with  those  per¬ 
ceptions  in  which  thought  is  mingled  with  sense.  In 
realizing  the  proportions  of  a  fagade,  a  series  of  but¬ 
tresses  or  a  segmented  cornice  aid  the  “  grasp/  ’  Even 
a  small  surface,  as  of  a  coin,  seems  more  completely 
known  when  divided:  the  spatial  perception  joined 
with  the  perception  of  number  gives,  as  it  were,  a  per¬ 
ception  of  higher  order.  The  principle  may  be  this :  that 
to  appreciate  any  experience  in  its  totality  we  must 
resort  to  the  device  of  really  or  mimetically  building 
it  up  from  numerable  parts ;  so  that  whatever  we  desire 
to  hold  vividly  before  consciousness  we  will  necessarily 
tend  to  divide  and  recompose  by  segments  or  in  rhyth¬ 
mic  intervals.  Rhythm  would  then  be  a  general  char¬ 
acter  of  art  forms,  i.e.,  of  the  forms  we  choose  for 
heightened  perception,  because  of  a  necessary  condi¬ 
tion  of  the  neural  substratum  of  cognition.  In  this  sense 
we  might  speak  of  rhythm  as  a  necessary  interest.3 

Can  these  necessary  interests  be  enumerated? 

It  seems  evident  to  me  that  many  names  which  have 
rumbled  through  theories  of  instinct  without  gaining 

3  Mr.  Joseph  Lee  includes  rhythm  in  his  list  of  instincts.  Play  in 
Education,  1915,  ch.  xx. 


NECESSARY  INTERESTS 


85 


any  definite  lodgment  have  been  aimed  at  this  place. 
We  have  heard  of  an  instinct  of  self-preservation;  and 
as  no  definite  stimulus  or  response  can  he  alleged  for 
such  an  instinct,  it  has  been  dropped  from  the  books, 
and  some  of  its  ingredients  retained,  as  pugnacity  or 
self-assertion  or  fear.  The  ‘will  to  live’  and  the  ‘will  to 
power ’  have  been  allowed  a  possible  place  in  metaphys¬ 
ics,  but  with  the  distinct  understanding  that  they  have 
no  status  in  psychology.  ‘ Sociability ’  or  ‘gregarious¬ 
ness  ’  is  commonly  regarded  as  a  native  trait ;  yet  it  will 
be  found  as  difficult  to  define  a  sense-stimulus  and  re¬ 
sponse  for  the  social  propensities  of  men  as  for  their 
curiosity. 

My  judgment  is  that  the  most  significant  of  original 
human  tendencies  are  tendencies  of  this  central  sort. 
I  should  include  among  these  necessary  interests  our 
sociability  as  well  as  our  curiosity,  and  hence  certain 
major  ingredients  of  ambition  and  the  family  affec¬ 
tions.  I  have  mentioned  our  formal  interest  in  rhythra, 
and  there  are  other  formal  interests  which  appear  to 
be  equally  native,  and  to  play  a  part  in  aesthetics  and 
logic,  such  as  the  interest  in  simplicity,  uility,  harmony, 
etc.,  possibly  also  the  prejudice  in  favor  of  thorough¬ 
ness,  clean-cut-ness,  which  runs  a  long  gamut  from  the 
careful  toilet-making  of  animals  to  the  passion  for 
separateness  and  purity  of  many  of  the  saintly-minded. 
As  for  ‘self-preservation/  I  incline  to  recognize  in  the 
phrase  a  fact  of  human  nature  more  elemental  than 
pugnacity  or  self-assertion,  which  might  be  understood 
as  follows : 

The  will  to  live,  for  a  being  with  a  mind,  must  always 


86 


THE  NATURAE  MAN 


mean  the  will  to  be  mentally  alive  as  well  as  to  be 
physically  metabolizing.  The  presumption  is  that  the 
simple  fact  of  being  conscious ,  other  things  equal,  is  a 
satisfactory  condition;  and  that  a  self-conscious  being 
would  with  a  necessity  both  constitutional  and  logical 
(in  Professor  Perry’s  sense)  tend  to  preserve  the  fact 
and  to  increase  the  quantity  of  his  liveliness  or  aware¬ 
ness.  If  it  is  not  merely  the  contents  of  experience  that 
are  valuable,  but  the  process  of  experiencing,  it  is  clear 
that  so  far  as  a  being  is  self-conscious  he  will  neces¬ 
sarily  have  a 4 will  to  live,’  or  an  ‘instinct  of  self-preser¬ 
vation.  9 

In  these  necessary  interests,  we  have  the  most_sig- 
nificant  but  also  the  most  obscure  of  original  human 
tendencies.  It  is  they  that  have  been  the  chief  stum¬ 
bling  block  in  the  theory  of  instinct;  for  while  that 
theory  becomes  comparatively  trivial  when  they  are 
omitted,  it  has  always  been  muddled  when  they  have 
been  included.  The  attempt  to  assimilate  them  to  the 
type  of  stimulus  and  response  could  hardly  have  ended 
otherwise  than  in  confusion.  On  their  physiological 
side,  they  are  elusive,  inaccessible  to  observation,  and 
refractory  to  experiment :  they  are  consequences  of  the 
fact  that  the  stuff  of  which  we  are  made  works  bet¬ 
ter  in  one  way  than  another,  and  not  of  an  arrangement 
of  connections  whereby  muscles  can  be  set  moving  by 
an  impact  from  outside.  On  the  other  hand,  to  cut  loose 
from  the  reflex-arc  pattern  has  been  too  often  to  cut 
loose  from  the  control  of  empirical  categories  alto¬ 
gether  in  completing  the  tale  of  our  original  endow¬ 
ment.  If  we  are  to  believe  that  “the  behavior  of  man  in 


NECESSAKY  INTEKESTS 


87 


the  family,  in  business,  in  the  state,  in  religion,  and  in 
every  other  affair  of  life  is  rooted  in  his  unlearned 
original  equipment,  ’ n  that  equipment  mpst  be  a  capital 
stock  of  large  moment  ;  but  if  at  the  same  time  we  can 
reach  no  agreement  as  to  what  it  is,  and  no  better  de¬ 
scription  than  such  terms  as  ‘the  will  to  live,,  we  can 
understand  a  revolt  against  the  use  of  the  conception 
of  instinct  in  psychology  and  in  the  social  sciences. 

The  chief  difficulty  of  reaching  a  clear  and  exhaustive 
enumeration  of  these  tendencies,  and  hence  the  chief 
reason  for  the  all-but-arbitrary  variety  that  has  pre¬ 
vailed  in  the  lists  of  the  more  general  instincts,  does  not 
lie,  however,  in  their  peculiar  mechanism :  it  lies  in  the 
fact  that  they  are  not  distinct  and  separable  entities. 
They  are  in  reality  various  aspects  of  one  fundamental 
instinct  or  necessary  interest.  The  variety  of  partly 
overlapping  terms  for  the  more  general  instinct  is  due 
to  the  variety  of  approaches  to  the  same  object.  Could 
we  identify  this  object,  we  should  at  once  have  the  clue 
to  this  variety,  and  be  freed  from  its  confusion  and 
from  the  futile  effort  to  enumerate  all  forms  which  the 
central  instinct  could  take. 

If  we  cannot  identify  it,  we  can  at  least  draw  atten¬ 
tion  to  its  existence,  make  evident  the  fact  that  the 
general  instincts  have  a  region  of  coalescence,  being 
related  as  the  fingers  of  a  hand  rather  than  as  the 
separate  twigs  in  a  bundle,  and  indicate  that  this  com¬ 
mon  region  is  of  the  first  importance  for  our  estimate 
of  original  human  nature. 

4  Thorndike,  Educational  Psychology,  I,  p.  4. 


CHAPTER  XI 


THE  WILL 

IT  is  notoriously  hard  to  read  the  motives  of  other 
men’s  acts.  And  while  we  have  a  position  of  ad¬ 
vantage  in  judging  the  motives  of  our  own  acts,  the 
chances  of  error  are  still  large.  A  writer  of  fiction 
might  fairly  be  allowed  to  claim  knowledge  of  the 
minds  of  his  own  creations :  yet  even  here,  if  I  am  not 
mistaken,  there  is  a  visible  dread  of  dogmatism,  and 
romance  is  tending  to  return  to  the  psychological  reti¬ 
cence  of  the  drama,  which  reveals  the  mind  chiefly 
through  situation  and  behavior. 

This  new  demand  for  objectivity  need  not  mean  that 
‘motives’  are  fictions.  It  may  well  mean  that  our  theory 
of  motives  is  unsatisfactory.  The  question  whether  one 
who  joins  the  colors  is  actuated  by  pugnacity,  or  by 
love  of  country,  or  by  ambition,  or  by  mob  conscious¬ 
ness,  or  by  need  of  shining  in  the  eyes  of  some  woman, 
is  a  futile  question:  but  it  is  futile,  less  because  the 
truth  is  so  hard  to  ascertain  than  because  of  a  false 
assumption  in  the  question.  For,  since  the  presence  of 
one  of  these  motives  need  not  exclude  another,  the 
either-or  assumption  of  any  such  question  is  gratui¬ 
tous.  All  actual  motives  are  mixed.  Synthesis  or  fusion 
of  motives,  which  to  Holt  is  the  chief  moral  obligation, 
is  in  fact  the  universal  and  natural  practice. 

But  the  question  I  wish  to  raise  is  not  whether 


THE  WILL 


89 


motives  are  compounded :  it  is  rather  whether  they  are 
originally  separate.  It  is  here,  I  believe,  that  we  find 
the  root  of  the  difficulty .. 

Can  we  say,  for  example,  that  curiosity  is  one  thing 
and  the  love  of  power  or  security  a  different  and  sepa¬ 
rable  thing?  The  interest  with  which  civilization  reads 
its  morning  paper,  the  disposition  to  gossip  and  to  hear 
gossip,  the  most  flagrant  acts  of  prying  or  eavesdrop¬ 
ping, — is  it  certain  that  these  are  to  be  put  down  to 
intellectual  hunger  and  not  to  the  ‘  instinct  of  self- 
preservation  ’  (since  ignorance  is  undeniably  a  state 
of  peril),  or  to  the  ‘ instinct  of  self-assertion ’  (since 
knowledge  promises  control  of  persons  and  events)  ? 
If  the  superficial  observer  finds  it  hard  to  decide  such 
questions,  is  the  psychologist  in  a  happier  position?1 

Is  not  the  situation  this:  that  motives  can  have  no 
such  separateness  as  their  names  suggest?  A  mental 
experiment  may  throw  some  light  on  this  matter. 
Imagine  a  mind  at  the  beginning  of  its  career,  respond¬ 
ing  to  its  first  instinctive  impulse;  and  then  to  its 
second.  Assume  that  this  second  experience  is  as  differ¬ 
ent  from  the  first  as  possible,  involving  different  sense- 
tracts,  different  viscera,  and  different  muscles  through¬ 
out.  By  what  sign  would  the  second  experience  belong 
to  the  same  mind  as  the  first;  i.e.,  how  could  we  dis¬ 
tinguish  these  two  from  experiences  in  two  different 

1  Speaking  of  the  motives  of  ‘  ‘  those  dangerous  journeys  of  dis¬ 
covery,  etc.,  by  which  the  whole  earth  has  been  mapped  out  during  the 
last  four  hundred  years,”  Graham  Wallas  suggests  that  li  perhaps, 
indeed,  it  is  this  desire  for  Fear,  rather  than  the  impulse  of  Curiosity, 
which  has  been  the  most  important  single  cause.”  The  Great  Society, 
p.  89. 


90 


THE  NATURAL  MAN 


minds?  The  answer  is  both  obvious  and  simple:  if 
the  second  experience  is  an  experience  of  the  same 
mind,  it  will  appear  with  the  memory  of  the  first  ex¬ 
perience  attending  it,  and  hence  as  bearing  the  char¬ 
acter  expressed  in  the  word  “another”:  it  will  appear 
as  another  experience.  No  matter  how  different  the 
scenery  of  the  adventure,  the  new  craving  is  still 
another  craving,  the  groping  activity  takes  on  a  tinge 
of  expectation  because  another  groping  had  preceded 
it,  and  the  end  when  it  comes  will  be  another  settle¬ 
ment.  In  brief,  what  marks  these  two  experiences  as 
belonging  to  the  same  mind  is  the  incipient  classing  or 
generalizing,  whereby  the  two  interests  appear  as  two 
interests ,  i.e.,  as  two  cases  of  a  common  value-mean¬ 
ing.  Only  when  successive  experiences,  whatever  their 
differences  of  content,  have  this  in  common,  that  they 
affect  for  better  or  for  worse  an  identical  concern  in 
fortune,  is  there  any  self  at  all.  And  conversely,  wher¬ 
ever  there  is  a  self,  there  all  experiences  are  referred 
to  a  common  interest:  they  are  being  perpetually  sorted 
as  satisfactory  or  unsatisfactory  by  a  test  in  which  no 
one  can  instruct  any  mind  but  itself.  To  ask,  then, 
whether  the  various  goods  of  life,  or  the  various  values 
indicated  by  our  instincts,  have  a  common  character 
is  to  ask  a  self -answering  question.  No  satisfaction  is 
such  except  by  grace  of  the  fact  that  beneath  all  differ¬ 
ences  it  presents  to  an  identical  self  an  identical  mean¬ 
ing  with  every  other  satisfaction. 

A  self  might  be  described  as  a  permanent  principle 
of  selection.  It  has  no  a  priori  knowledge  of  what  the 
world  contains,  nor  yet  of  the  dispositions  which  we  say 


THE  WILL 


91 


it  already  has.  Only  experience  can  reveal  to  a  self  what 
qualities  are  possible,  and  what  are  to  be  judged  as 
agreeable  or  otherwise:  it  learns  empirically  what 
things  are  good.  But  what  good  is  it  cannot  learn  em¬ 
pirically;  since  the  use  of  this  knowledge  is  implied 
in  the  first  judgment.  Nevertheless,  experience  has 
everything  to  do  in  bringing  this  knowledge  into  the 
foreground  of  consciousness. 

Experience  must  first  show  what  goods  there  are  in 
the  world :  one  cannot  desire  good-in-general  while  yet 
it  covers  no  particulars.  Experience  of  hunger-and- 
eating  makes  it  possible  to  desire  good-in-the-form-of- 
food;  experience  of  music  makes  it  possible  to  desire 
good-in-the-form-of-music.  Enjoyment  precedes  desire, 
so  far  as  desire  becomes  definite ;  pain  precedes  aver¬ 
sion.  Experience  must,  further,  bring  about  situations 
requiring  choice  between  concrete  goods,  and  so  compel 
that  effort  to  find  the  ‘  preferable  ’  or  the  ‘  better/  which 
in  turn  compels  some  sense,  however  obscure,  of  com¬ 
mon  measure  and  so  of  common  quality.  The  goods 
led  to  by  the  different  instincts  appear  incomparable 
enough:  what  have  hunting  and  courting,  feasting, 
building,  caring  for  children,  to  do  with  one  another? 
Are  they  not  so  many  activities,  unrelated  save  as  they 
might  all  find  a  place  serially  in  a  lifetime?  Even  so, 
the  satisfaction  of  activity  within  a  workable  life- 
picture  is  a  common  element,  and  a  point  of  attachment 
for  more  that  is  common.  For  after  all,  choices  be¬ 
tween  hunting-activity  and  courting-activity,  etc.,  are 
effected;  and  by  something  other  than  blind  fiat.  If 
the  choice  is  oneys  own  choice ,  defensible  to  himself  if 


92 


THE  NATURAL  MAN 


to  no  one  else,  it  is  because  be  finds  more  of  himself, 
under  the  circumstances,  in  the  one  than  in  the  other, — 
more  of  his  good.  And  so,  by  dint  of  much  choosing, 
among  all  possible  pairs  of  goods,  what  one’s  good  is 
begins  to  appear  as  a  distinct  item  of  self-conscious¬ 
ness.  Meanwhile,  experience  has  aided  the  emergence 
of  the  notion  in  a  third  way.  For  while  enjoyment  pre¬ 
cedes  definite  desire,  the  desire  which  follows  enjoy¬ 
ment  is  never  desire  for  exact  repetition  of  the  enjoy¬ 
ment.  In  taking  the  pleasure  up  into  the  mind,  it  is 
developed  and  improved  (by  imagination,  we  sometimes 
say) ;  and  what  we  then  desire  is  a  better  good.  What 
experience  has  given  is  varied  in  a  direction  which  we 
name  the  4 ideal’;  the  ideal  is  a  joint  product  of  ex¬ 
perience  and  the  latent  idea  of  good ,  whose  nature  is 
shown  to  some  extent  in  that  deflection.2  Thus,  by  a 
history  of  accepting  and  rejecting,  choosing  and  dream¬ 
building,  and,  further,  of  sorting  out  dreams  according 
to  their  realizable  or  not-yet-realizable  character,  one ’s 
working  idea  of  the  good-common-to-all-separate-goods 
pulls  forward  from  the  background  of  consciousness 
into  the  definable  foreground.  The  dawning  of  such 
self-possession  means  the  achievement  of  a  more  or 
less  stable  policy  toward  incoming  suggestions  and 
impulses.  And  to  have  a  stable  policy  is  to  have,  in  the 
specific  sense  of  the  word,  a  will. 

Will  in  this  sense  is  a  matter  of  degree.  At  an  alarm 

2  It  is  minimization  of  the  role  of  the  ideal  that  makes  it  possible  for 
Dewey  to  describe  the  will  as  a  mass  of  habits  ( Human  Nature  and  Con¬ 
duct,  pp.  24,  25).  Habit  gives  the  will  volume,  momentum,  and  assumed 
applicability;  but  there  is  such  a  thing  as  a  will  to  change  habit. 


THE  WILL 


93 


of  fire,  a  schoolboy  may  respond  by  running  to  the 
scene  approximately  ‘ without  a  thought’:  in  a  few 
more  years  the  same  stimulus  encounters  an  order  of 
life  having  a  momentum  of  its  own,  and  if  it  wins  the 
day,  it  is  by  an  act  of  ‘will.’  Will  exists  when,  and 
in  so  far  as,  any  instinctive  impulse  has  first  to  obtain 
the  consent  of  a  ruling  policy  before  pursuing  its 
course.3  The  policy  of  a  self  is  its  acquired  interpreta¬ 
tion  of  its  own  good,  i.e.,  of  its  central  and  necessary 
interest. 

And  thus,  if  men  are  alike  in  nature,  we  should  be 
able  to  perceive  at  the  center  of  all 4  ‘  central  instincts  ’  ’ 
or  “necessary  interests,”  and  indeed  within  all  in¬ 
stincts  whatever,  a  nucleus  of  common  meaning  which 
we  would  be  justified  in  calling  the  fundamental  in¬ 
stinct  of  man,  the  substance  of  the  human  will.  No  one 
description  of  this  central  instinct  is  likely  to  be  suffi¬ 
cient:  we  may  at  once  renounce  the  idea  that  a  final 
and  satisfactory  definition  can  be  given.  The  native 
hold  which  man  has  on  his  good,  his  instinct  par  excel¬ 
lence,  is  likely  to  evade  capture  in  any  neat  vessel  of 
concepts.  But  the  perception  of  it  is  difficult  only  as  all 
perception  of  what  is  both  intimate  and  always  present 
is  difficult;  and  the  effort  to  improve  our  conceptual 

3  In  this  sense,  instinctive  action  is  a  precondition  of  volitional  action. 
But  without  arbitrary  line-drawing,  there  is  no  moment  at  which  we  may 
say,  Here  will  begins.  For  will  is  only  the  original  and  permanent  pur¬ 
posiveness  of  the  self  made  definite  to  the  self  by  its  own  experience:  it 
is  what  that  purposiveness  has  always  meant,  and  it  begins  therefore 
with  experience,  and  develops  with  it  so  long  as  the  individual  continues 
to  learn  his  own  mind. 


94 


THE  NATURAL  MAH 


vessels  is  not  to  be  abandoned  merely  because  there  is 
always  a  remainder.  Thus  “the  will  to  live”  was  used 
by  Schopenhauer  not  to  indicate  an  instinct  among 
many,  but  to  indicate  the  instinct  of  man:  and  the 
phrase  is  not  a  false  one,  except  that  it  allows  the  im¬ 
pression  of  an  impulse  primarily  directed  to  the  sub¬ 
jective,  perhaps  vegetative,  fact  of  existence.  The  “will 
to  power”  escapes  this  danger,  doing  better  justice  to 
the  outward  direction  of  the  primitive  energies.  It  has 
a  savage  history,  but  it  may  be  possible  to  control  and 
amend  its  meaning  so  that  it  will  serve  us.  Let  us  en¬ 
quire  how  much  it  can  convey  of  what  is  common  in 
some  of  the  major  instincts. 

It  is  not  hard  to  see  that  many  of  the  simple  and 
general  instincts  deal  with  the  fluxes  of  power,  in  one 
way  or  another,  and  may  be  referred  to  a  general  vital 
interest  in  conserving  or  increasing  power.  Food-get¬ 
ting  instincts  reach  their  apparent  goal  in  the  satis¬ 
fying  of  hunger;  yet  it  would  be  a  bold  psychology 
that  would  affirm  that  eating,  to  the  human  species,  has 
no  more  general  meaning  than  quenching  this  craving. 
Hunger,  I  dare  say,  is  felt  as  a  diminished  status,  a 
sign  of  a  dependence  on  material  intake,  which  eating 
both  confesses  and  temporarily  removes.  It  is  per¬ 
haps  the  element  of  physical  humility  which  makes 
the  taking  of  food  a  fit  occasion  for  sociability:  for 
here  is  the  most  natural  and  permanent  democracy, 
that  of  equal  dependence  on  material  nature  for  con¬ 
tinued  life.  But  the  social  instinct  would  hardly  make 
so  much  of  a  mutual  confession  of  dependence  if  there 
were  not  also  a  mutual  emancipation.  Eating,  by  itself, 


THE  WILL 


95 


is  a  form  of  conquest,  surrounding  what  is  alien  and 
making  it  a  part  of  ourselves.  The  satisfaction  of  food 
to  a  thoroughly  hungry  man  is  less  a  matter  of  the 
aesthetics  of  taste  than  a  consciousness  of  making  some¬ 
thing  his  own,  a  sense  of  mastery.  But  beyond  this,  he 
is  aware  of  eating  as  releasing  the  springs  of  his  right¬ 
ful  attitude  toward  the  world,  his  control  of  his  own 
fortune.  In  both  ways,  the  satisfaction  of  hunger  is  at 
the  same  time  a  satisfaction  of  an  impulse  which  makes, 
immediately  and  unreflectingly,  for  holding  toward  the 
not-self  a  relation  of  potency. 

Play  hardly  bears  the  conventional  aspect  of  the  will 
to  power.  It  seems  to  consist,  as  we  noticed  above,  in 
a  social  soft-pedalling  of  the  major  instincts,  rather 
than  in  any  distinct  tendency  of  its  own.  Yet  the  play 
world  may  be  accurately  described,  on  its  psychologi¬ 
cal  side,  as  the  world  of  practice  in  mastery.  In  play, 
growing  humanity  carries  on  a  career  with  plastic 
materials,  such  as  it  can  control  with  its  small  powers, 
until  it  is  ready  to  throw  away  its  playthings  and  try 
a  fall  with  realities. 

Fear  is  a  negative  expression  of  our  concern  for 
power.  The  general  element  running  through  all  the 
scores  of  situations  which  excite  fear  is  the  presence 
of  an  environment  for  which  none  of  our  instinctive 
powers  fit  us.  In  water,  or  fire,  or  chasms  of  air,  or  the 
world  of  ghosts,  our  instincts  lose  their  grip.  In  such 
event  a  residual  instinct,  felt  as  fear,  tends  to  remove 
us  from  the  uncanny  world  to  one  in  which  we  may 
once  more  say,  I  can.  Thus  fear  also  is  a  form  of  the 


96  THE  NATURAL  MAN 

fundamental  impulse  to  be  in  a  relation  of  power  to 
experience. 

The  instinctive  side  of  sex-love  clearly  involves  in 
various  ways  an  effort  to  attain  and  exert  power.  It 
belongs  to  the  era  of  mature  physical  and  mental 
forces ;  it  implies  that  one  is  able  to  see  life  whole,  to 
administer  it,  to  call  it  into  existence.  It  means  readi¬ 
ness  to  assume  responsibility  for  the  welfare  of  another 
human  being,  though  the  feat  of  being  responsible  for 
oneself  has  taxed  competence.  It  means,  at  the  same 
time,  quest  for  a  missing  element  in  one’s  own  self- 
confidence,  for,  until  one  can  win  that  completeness  of 
regard  which  acceptance  conveys,  one’s  status  in  the 
world  lacks  an  element  of  security.  Sex-love  is  potency 
in  search  of  a  sanction. 

I  do  not  doubt  that  other  instinctive  tendencies  will 
show  themselves,  upon  examination,  in  a  similar  light ; 
for  the  will  to  power  is  perhaps  the  nearest  name  that 
has  yet  been  found  for  the  central  thread  of  instinct. 
The  will  to  live  is  in  some  ways  a  less  misleading  name. 
But  in  man,  the  will  to  live  must  take  the  form  of  the 
will  to  live  as  a  man;  and  this  involves  much  more 
than  the  cherishing  of  existence, — it  involves  dealing 
with  a  world  of  objects  and  resistances,  and  holding 
intact  one’s  validity  in  the  midst  of  that  intercourse. 
More  than  that,  it  implies  the  process  of  the  artist, 
that  of  imposing  upon  the  external  mass  an  element 
of  form  and  order  that  is  first  one’s  own.  This  active 
and  creative  quality  is  better  suggested  by  the  phrase, 
the  will  to  power. 


THE  WILL 


97 


This  phrase  need  not  be  regarded  with  prejudice 
because  it  has  been  used  by  Nietzsche  ;  nor  because  it 
allies  itself  with  the  most  glaring  defects  of  temper. 
Nietzsche’s  error  is  not  that  he  struck  a  false  note 
in  human  nature;  but  firstly  that  he  supposed  his 
expression  to  be  adequate,  and  secondly  that  he  thought 
of  power  as  intrinsically  competitive,  a  good  which  can 
be  gained  by  one  only  at  the  expense  of  another.  In  our 
use  of  the  phrase  we  shall  at  the  outset  reject  both 
these  errors.  We  do  not  regard  the  will  to  power  as  an 
adequate  name  for  the  central  instinct.  And  we  reject 
the  competitive  relation  as  necessarily  implied  in  the 
concept  of  power.  Power  over  nature  is  the  type  of  all 
actual  commonwealth.  And  the  power  of  men  over  one 
another  may  be  at  the  same  time  a  power-for, — as  the 
power  which  a  parent  has  for,  and  over,  a  child.  And 
the  rightful  position  of  one  man  toward  others  cannot 
be  described  without  this  conception :  for  this  position 
does  not  consist  merely  in  being  amiably  disposed 
toward  them,  but  rather  in  standing  in  loco  Dei  toward 
them,  and  acting  as  a  Providence  to  them.  To  love  man¬ 
kind  and  to  seek  this  power  are  not  separable;  and  it 
is  well  to  be  reminded  that  love  without  this  element 
of  responsible  ambition  is  not  fit  to  survive. 

The  instinct  of  man  is  Protean ;  but  so  is  also  the  will 
to  power.  To  point  out  the  unity  of  impulse  is  not  to 
deny  its  manifoldness.  The  will  to  power  cannot  be 
satisfied  in  its  generality :  it  must  be  satisfied  in  chang¬ 
ing  conditions.  If  power  is  hindered  by  ignorance,  then 
it  will  make  for  a  transition  to  knowledge;  'curiosity’ 
and  its  subordinate  mechanisms  will  be  called  into  play. 


98 


THE  NATURAL  MAN 


If  power  is  hindered  by  an  antagonist,  then  we  shall 
have  ‘  pugnacity  ’  and  its  mechanisms.  The  various  in¬ 
stinct-names  retain  their  usefulness,  since  they  indicate 
the  variety  of  situation  and  the  variety  of  situation- 
change  in  which  the  will  to  power  works. 

But  the  recognition  of  the  unity  has  another  impor¬ 
tance  than  that  which  always  attaches  in  science  to  re¬ 
porting  the  truth,  and  not  presenting  as  sundered  what 
are  really  joined.  If  the  instincts  are  indeed  several, 
then  the  life  program  must  provide  for  them  in  their 
severalty,  or  leave  us  with  a  mutilated  man.  But  if  these 
several  instincts  are  differentiations  of  some  funda¬ 
mental  impulse,  there  will  be  among  them  a  certain 
vicarious  possibility  of  satisfaction .  It  is  not  they  in 
their  severalty  that  need  to  be  satisfied:  it  is  the  will 
to  power.  If  they  are  repressed,  it  is  not  they  that  per¬ 
sist,  but  only  the  will  to  power.  Their  energy  cannot 
be  destroyed ;  but  the  thing  that  cannot  be  destroyed  is 
not  specifically  they .  The  energy  of  motion  may,  by 
impact,  be  transmuted  into  heat:  so,  for  these  partial 
impulses,  their  i repression’  is,  in  general,  their 
‘  sublimation.  ’ 

We  shall  accordingly  adopt  this  phrase,  the  will  to 
power,  as  a  working-name  for  the  instinctive  center  of 
the  human  will. 

Note.  Other  views  of  the  will :  the  Freudian  view. 

We  have  argued  the  question  whether  the  self  is  a  bundle 
of  distinct  cravings  or  a  single  craving  with  many  forms,  as 
if  it  were  a  question  of  logical  necessity.  Yet  it  would  seem 
to  be  a  question  for  whose  answer  men  might  fairly  be  re¬ 
ferred  to  their  own  experience.  And  I  agree  that  what  the 


THE  WILL 


99 


self  is,  and  what  the  will  is,  are  empirical  questions  whose 
answer  each  self  holds  within  its  own  experience;  only,  it 
sometimes  requires  a  touch  of  logic  to  induce  the  human  mind 
to  face  the  facts. 

Radical  empiricism  in  psychology  once  meant  seeing  noth¬ 
ing  of  the  mind  but  a  swirl  of  separable  ‘states’;  a  still  later 
empiricism  professes  to  find  nothing  of  the  mind  but  a  system 
of  behavior.  But  empiricism  is  not  incapable  of  finding  con¬ 
nections  and  unities, — if  they  exist.  The  perception  of  unity 
in  psychology,  though  clearer  to  Plato  than  to  Aristotle,  is  no 
prerogative  of  a  monistic  metaphysics.  I  doubt  whether  any¬ 
one  will  accuse  Buddha  of  being  a  monist,  and  he  certainly 
did  his  best  to  destroy  the  theory  of  a  soul ;  yet  Buddha,  after 
referring  all  suffering  to  desire,  referred  all  desire  to  a  single 
craving  which  he  described  as  the  craving  for  individuality 
or  separateness  of  being.  And  modem  naturalism  is  not  with¬ 
out  tendencies  of  the  same  kind.  If  mind  has  an  evolutionary 
history,  and  particularly  if  it  has  grown  by  “differentiation 
and  integration”  from  the  simple  to  the  complex,  nothing 
would  be  more  natural  than  to  derive  (as  G.  H.  Schneider 
has  tried  to  do,  or  M.  Hachet-Souplet)  our  many  instincts 
from  a  primordial  instinct  or  tropism;  and  nothing  would  be 
more  natural  than  to  suppose  that  these  kinships  of  origin 
would  remain  as  kinships  of  quality  and  meaning. 

But  evolutionary  psychology,  and  in  fact  all  genetic  psy¬ 
chology,  is  necessarily  a  mixture  of  empiricism  with  a  degree 
of  speculation.  It  is  therefore  a  matter  of  theoretical  inter¬ 
est  when  a  group  of  psychiatrists,  presumably  on  the  basis 
of  clinical  experience  alone,  find  themselves  reducing  all 
human  desires  to  a  single  root  as  a  working  hypothesis. 
“From  the  descriptive  standpoint,”  says  C.  G.  Jung,  “psy¬ 
choanalysis  accepts  the  multiplicity  of  instincts.  From  the 
genetic  standpoint  it  is  otherwise.  It  regards  the  multiplicity 
of  instincts  as  issuing  out  of  a  relative  unity,  the  primitive 
libido.  It  recognizes  that  definite  quantities  of  the  primitive 
libido  are  split  off,  associated  with  the  recently  created  func- 


100 


THE  NATURAL  MAN 


tions  and  finally  merged  with  them.  ...  We  term  libido  that 
energy  which  manifests  itself  by  vital  processes,  which  is  sub¬ 
jectively  perceived  as  aspiration,  longing,  and  striving.  We 
see  in  the  diversity  of  natural  phenomena  the  desire,  the 
libido,  in  most  diverse  applications  and  forms.  In  early  child¬ 
hood,  we  find  libido  at  first  wholly  in  the  form  of  the  in¬ 
stinct  of  nutrition.  .  .  .  Claparede  in  a  conversation  once 
remarked  that  we  could  as  well  use  the  term  ‘  interest.  ’  ”4 
Others  beside  Claparede  have  observed  that  the  Freudian 
psychology  has  important  philosophical  bearings,  which  are 
disguised  by  the  misleading  emphasis  of  its  terms.5  But  if 
‘libido’  is  too  specific  in  its  connotation,  the  term  ‘interest’ 
is  too  lacking  in  descriptive  force,  while  ‘ l’ elan  vital’  is  not 
intended  as  a  psychological  term  at  all.  The  ‘will  to  power’ 
escapes  all  these  defects.  Sex-love  itself,  which  to  the  Freud¬ 
ian  mind  seems  the  deepest  thing  in  human  nature,  is  far 
better  placed  as  a  derivative  expression  of  this  more  primitive 
will ;  for  what  more  profound  assertion  of  power  is  our  nature 
capable  of  than  in  that  impulse  which,  assuming  responsi¬ 
bility  for  the  life  and  welfare  of  another,  may  also  summon 
a  new  life  into  existence  ?  The  greatness  of  the  sex-motive  lies 
in  the  junction  which  it  is  able  to  effect  between  the  individual 
and  the  super-individual  ranges  of  power.  But  to  invert  the 

4  Theory  of  Psychoanalysis,  pp.  40,  42. 

6  Dr.  James  J.  Putnam  has  repeatedly  called  attention  to  this  point. 
“Let  its  name  he  altered,  and  its  functions  he  but  slightly  more  ex¬ 
panded,  and  we  have  Bergson’s  poussee  vitale,  the  understudy  of  self- 
activity.  ”  Journal  of  Abnormal  Psychology,  August-September,  1913. 
McDougall  speaks  to  the  same  effect  in  his  Outline  of  Psychology 
(1923).  “The  evolution  of  the  animal  world  may  properly  be  conceived 
as  primarily  and  essentially  the  differentiation  of  instinctive  tendencies 
from  some  primordial  undifferentiated  capacity  to  strive.  It  is  this 
undifferentiated  capacity  to  strive,  this  primordial  energy,  which 
M.  Bergson  has  named  l ’elan  vital,  which  others  (notably  Doctor  C.  G. 
Jung)  speak  of  as  the  libido,  and  which  perhaps  is  best  named  vital  en- 
ergy.  We  may  regard  the  instincts  as  so  many  channels  through  which 
the  vital  energy  pours  itself  into  or  through  the  organism.’’  P.  113. 


THE  WILL 


101 


relation  and  make  all  will  a  form  of  ‘libido’  is  simply  ex- 
centric;  and  can  yield  at  best  a  Ptolemaic  system  of  psy¬ 
chology.  Ptolemy’s  system  for  an  Egyptian  of  the  second 
century  was  a  great  achievement,  and  had  at  least  so  much  of 
truth, — that  the  world  has  some  center  of  gravity. 

But  what  name  and  character  we  give  to  this  center  of  our 
instinctive  being  is  not  an  unmomentous  matter,  when  we 
consider  that  of  all  our  nominally  many  native  hungers  this 
one  alone  must  imperatively  be  satisfied  if  we  are  to  have 
mental  soundness  or  normal  fulness  of  life.  Only  that  one 
impulse  cannot  be  substituted  for,  nor  sublimated,  nor  success¬ 
fully  repressed;  for  it  is  the  substance  of  all  the  proposed 
alternatives.  If  sex  is  this  center,  then  to  sex  belong  these  pre¬ 
rogatives.  If  it  is  not  the  center,  it  has  none  of  them,  without 
our  permission.  But  by  a  false  belief  about  what  is  necessary 
to  our  mental  peace,  we  may  create  a  necessity  where  none 
in  nature  exists. 


CHAPTER  XII 


MIND  AND  BODY :  THE  LAST  ANALYSIS 

MANY  questions  about  original  human  nature  are 
left  unanswered  by  a  discussion  of  instincts  and 
the  will.  For  example,  we  have  given  no  account  of 
individual  personality.  The  will  to  power  is  not  person¬ 
ality  ;  it  reveals  nothing  of  the  nature  of  personal  dif¬ 
ferences.  Upon  such  questions  we  shall  not  here  enter: 
for  it  is  the  business  of  psychology  to  find  first  what  the 
common  clay  is,  and  only  then  to  enquire  how  it  as¬ 
sumes  its  individual  shapes.  But  if  there  is  a  common 
clay,  a  craving  which  in  some  way  underlies  and  ex¬ 
plains  the  rest,  we  are  bound  to  take  at  least  a  glance 
at  the  question  what  this  clay  itself  is  made  of,  or 
whether  it  must  be  taken  as  an  ultimate  fact.  We  shall 
accordingly  make  a  brief  excursion  into  the  field  of 
speculation  regarding  ultimate  analysis. 

The  concept  of  energy  always  stands  at  the  elbow, 
with  promises  of  solving  riddles:  it  seemed  likely  at 
one  time  to  afford  the  common  term  for  the  dualism 
of  matter  and  motion;  it  has  tempted  many  since  the 
time  of  Leibniz  into  a  hope  of  passing  from  body  to 
mind  and  back  again.  If  the  will  to  power  could  be 
understood,  in  Nietzsche’s  terms,  as  a  need  to  give  ut¬ 
terance  to  the  energy  that  is  in  us,  we  should  be  on  the 
way  to  a  natural  understanding  of  human  nature. 

All  instinctive  tendencies,  and  so  of  course  the  cen- 


MIND  AND  BODY 


103 


tral  instinct,  are  inherited  with  the  body;  they  all  ex¬ 
pend  the  energy  developed  by  the  bodily  machine.  The 
nutrition  of  the  body  and  of  the  nervous  centers  pro¬ 
duces  a  readiness  to  act,  and  indeed  an  uneasiness  if 
action  is  delayed.  If  we  assume  that  onr  craving  accom¬ 
panies  this  condition  of  readiness  both  of  the  channels; 
of  discharge  and  of  the  centers  themselves,  we  shall 
have  a  physiological  picture  much  more  in  accord  with 
onr  concept  of  a  central  instinct  than  any  that  could 
be  furnished  by  the  schema  of  stimulus  and  response. 
The  presence  of  energy  as  a  tension  or  charge  serves 
here  in  lien  of  a  stimulus,  acting  immediately,  without 
afferent  apparatus.  The  discharge  itself,  the  transfor¬ 
mation  of  potential  into  kinetic  energy,  may  be  the  pri¬ 
mary  physical  basis  of  ‘  satisfaction. ’ 

I  should  not  hestitate  to  look  in  this  direction  for  a 
physical  theory  of  the  primitive  will  to  power.  I  should 
not  hestitate,  because  I  am  “not  afraid  of  falling  into 
my  own  inkpot.,,  No  one  who  thinks  twice  can  be  in  any 
danger  of  identifying  the  energy  which  is  measurable 
in  terms  of  mv2  or  fd  with  the  ‘  energy ’  of  his  own  will 
or  its  fluctuating  ‘  tensions  ’  of  desire.  Yet  the  ambiguity 
of  these  words  is  not  accidental;  no  doubt  the  two 
phases  of  energy  belong  together,  the  one  as  substance 
and  the  other  as  shadow.  But  in  this  fact  there  is  noth¬ 
ing  to  indicate  which  is  the  shadow .  In  truth,  when  we 
seek  for  physical  expressions,  we  have  left  behind  the 
direct  facts  of  experience  and  have  begun  to  spin  hy¬ 
potheses  for  the  sake  of  connecting  these  facts  with 
others.  We  do  not  by  this  route  penetrate  more  deeply 
into  the  nature  of  desire.  If  we  wish  to  know  what  de- 


104 


THE  NATUKAL  MAN 


sire  is  made  of,  we  should  do  better  to  seek  it  within  the 
completer  expressions  of  the  will  itself,  as  we  know 
them. 

If  we  can  anywhere  catch  a  glimpse  of  the  ultimate 
character  of  the  will,  it  should  be  in  our  answer  to  the 
work  of  an  artist.  For  it  is  his  work  to  bring  the  deep¬ 
est  things  in  us  into  active  response  to  the  deep  things 
of  the  world  outside.  Recently  I  saw  a  drama  which 
ventured  to  bring  to  mind  the  travesty  which  often 
goes  by  the  name  of  Justice;  and  I  returned  depressed 
and  resentful  and  disturbed  by  what  I  had  seen.  There 
had  been  forced  upon  my  attention  a  world  of  man¬ 
made  necessity,  the  Law,  in  whose  meshes  man  himself 
could  perish  both  as  victim  and  as  administrator.  I  saw 
the  efforts  of  men  to  rise  humanly  above  this  their  own 
work.  I  saw  a  world  of  blindness  and  futile  sympathies, 
pompous  certainties  that  are  false,  and  sentimental 
certainties  that  are  vain;  and  men  going  down  in  de¬ 
spair  because  no  one  hut  the  poet  saw  fiercely  enough 
the  realities  which  should  have  outweighed  the  whole 
pretentious  momentum  of  habit  and  routine.  I  knew  that 
the  poet  spoke  some  untruth ;  and  also  that  he  saw  and 
spoke  more  truth  than  men  are  usually  privileged  to 
see.  And  I  knew  also,  what  is  important  for  us  at  this 
moment,  that  the  feelings  and  desires  of  men  (so  many 
partial  applications  of  will)  are  made  by  such  percep¬ 
tions  as  these. 

Desire,  or  more  generally,  feeling,  is  not  something 
disparate  from  thought:  feeling  is  a  mass  of  idea  at 
work  within  us.  It  is  a  thorough  fallacy  to  suppose  that 
,  one  can  feel  or  care  about  anything  without  knowledge, 


MIND  AND  BODY 


105 


or  that  feeling  and  knowledge  are  inversely  propor¬ 
tional  to  one  another.  The  theory  of  feeling  has  been 
seriously  distorted  by  confusing  feeling  with  more  or 
less  incontinent  or  futile  or  unstable  types  of  motor 
discharge,  “emotional  temperaments ’ ’  and  the  like. 
Feeling  is  an  experience  of  “making  up  one’s  mind,” 
rising  to  an  occasion,  appreciating  something  to  the 
extent  of  mobilizing  the  powers  of  action.  The  proper 
contrast  to  feeling  is  not  thought  but  callousness ;  and 
wherever  I  am  insensitive  to  an  interest  or  concern 
which  finer  members  of  the  race  care  about,  I  may  know 
that  the  root  of  my  deficiency  is  a  lack  of  intelligence  or 
vision. 

If  we  are  right  in  this,  feeling,  whether  in  the  form 
of  uneasiness,  desire,  aspiration,  or  satisfaction,  is 
thought,  more  or  less  in  control  of  things,1  and  will,  in 
the  last  analysis,  is  thought  assuming  control  of  reality . 

i  In  terms  of  a  colloquial  phrase,  the  common  element  in  value  is  idea 
* 1  making  good. ’  ’  It  is  easier  to  see  that  making  good  is  a  desirable 
state  of  affairs,  than  to  see  that  it  is  the  desirable  state  of  affairs.  To  • 
make  good  requires  that  one  has  first  an  idea  of  something  worth 
making,  something  that  has  value  independent  of  the  process  of  realizing 
it.  Then  to  realize  it  has  the  additional  value  of  giving  me  a  sense  of 
validity, — my  ‘idea*  has  come  true.  But  what  we  want  to  find  out  is 
the  quality  of  this  presupposed  value:  what  constitutes  the  desirableness 
of  the  object  of  my  idea?  Realism  in  the  theory  of  values  holds  that 
the  value  is  there,  in  the  object, — an  ultimate  quality,  and  there’s  an 
end  of  it.  Relativism  holds  that  value  is  the  relation  of  the  object  to 
my  welfare,  or  my  instinct,  or  my  desire, — desire,  instinct,  etc.,  being 
assumed  as  given  facts  about  which  nothing  more  can  be  said,  except  to 
analyze  their  physiological  basis,  as  above  attempted.  I  hold  that  either 
of  these  solutions,  taken  as  final,  simply  gives  up  the  problem.  What 
we  desire,  we  do  not  desire  helplessly,  because  we  are  so  constituted  that 
a  given  object  sets  certain  mechanisms  tingling.  What  we  desire  has  an 
account  to  give  to  consciousness  itself,  and, — as  we  have  maintained, — 
an  account  which  in  general  terms  is  identical  in  all  cases  of  desire.  We 


106 


THE  NATUKAL  MAN 


It  would  follow  from  this  that  human  instincts, — all 
of  them, — while  from  the  standpoint  of  physical  theory 
they  are  such  stuff  as  solar  systems  are  made  of,  are 
from  a  metaphysical  standpoint  such  stuff  as  dreams, 
ideas,  and  reasonings  are  made  of.  Pleasure  and  pain, 
as  termini  of  the  simpler  instincts,  seem  at  first  sight 
ultimate  data  for  psychology:  we  are  “so  made”  that 
we  enjoy  and  seek  this,  suffer  from  and  avoid  that.  Yet 
even  these  values,  the  last  to  yield  to  analysis,  are 
clearly  not  ultimate  and  irresoluble.  Sensation  changes 
its  quality  under  change  of  mind,  as  one  responds  to  a 
slight  hurt  with  increased  vehemence  and  concentration 
of  action,  and  finds  relief  in  shaking  a  pinched  finger. 
A  child  takes  pleasure  in  piling  up  blocks,  and  Meyer 
suggests  that  the  sensation  of  the  pile  is  more  intense 

must  penetrate  the  nature  of  the  independent  good  as  it  appears  to  con¬ 
sciousness.  For  example,  suppose  I  care  for  music  and  exert  myself  to 
be  able  to  make  music.  There  is  satisfaction  in  the  achieving;  but  there 
must  have  been  a  prior  satisfaction  in  the  music.  It  is  this  prior  satis- 
V  faction  of  which  I  propose  that  it  also  is  a  case  of  thought  making 
good.  The  value  of  music,  I  would  maintain,  is  that  it  sets  before  us  a 
world  of  which  it  would  be  too  little  to  say  that  it  was  auspicious  to 
our  ears,  or  with  Kant,  to  our  imagination;  the  value  of  music  is  that 
it  summons  up  through  the  vehicle  of  a  mass  of  tone  amenable  to  our 
thought  the  entire  reality  of  our  experience,  in  vaguely  generalized 
situations  and  moods,  with  reflective  or  contemplative  mastery.  It  has  to 
do  with  intensities,  masses,  and  relations  of  sensation  only  as  these  sug¬ 
gest  to  a  mind  groping  for  a  favorable  attunement  to  its  world  some 
happier  adjustment.  And  I  should  say  the  same  of  our  more  organic 
satisfactions.  On  this  basis  we  can  do  justice  to  both  realism  and  rela¬ 
tivism.  To  realism  it  seems  that  desire  is  defined  by  the  good,  the  good 
being  defined  by  itself;  to  relativism  it  seems  that  the  good  is  defined 
by  desire.  From  our  point  of  view  the  good  is  defined  not  by  itself,  but 
in  relation  to  us;  yet  not  to  us  as  beings  fated  to  desire  this  or  that, — 
rather  as  beings  capable  of  thinking  and  knowing  this  and  that,  and  the 
whole  of  things  through  them.  To  this  extent,  good  is  objective. 


MIND  AND  BODY 


107 


than  that  of  the  single  block.  But  the  pile  gives  a  satis¬ 
faction  which  the  row  does  not  give ;  and  why?  The  pile, 
like  the  row,  is  an  order,  a  thought ;  hut  it  is  a  thought 
which  reality  has  with  greater  difficulty  been  induced 
to  accept  and  even  enlisted  to  sustain.  The  control  of 
fact  by  thought  is  more  in  evidence.  Has  thought  any¬ 
thing  to  do  with  sex-interest,  or  sex-interest  with 
thought?  We  shall  recur  to  this  question;  but  to  those 
who  know  the  trouble  of  the  lover,  it  would  seem  absurd 
to  say  that  either  sense-pleasure  or  the  satisfaction  of 
formal  beauty  were  sufficient  so  to  absorb  his  mind  or 
undo  his  peace.  It  includes  these  in  its  scope  only  as 
they,  too,  touch  the  fringes  of  universal  mystery  and 
insight. 

Pragmatic  writers,  in  the  interest  of  showing  that  all 
thought  has  an  active  meaning,  have  sometimes  gone 
to  great  lengths  in  exhibiting  the  logical  qualities  of 
instinct  and  tropism.  Charles  Peirce  does  not  hesitate 
to  say  that  ‘ 1  In  point  of  fact  a  syllogism  virtually  takes 
place  when  we  irritate  the  foot  of  a  decapitated  frog.  ’ ,2 
But  the  force  of  such  interpretations  is  not  to  show  that 
logic  is  permeated  by  psychology :  it  is  rather  to  show 
that  psychology  is  permeated  by  logic.  That  which  from 

2  Instinct  has  sometimes  been  called  an  unconscious  reason,  not  be¬ 
cause  there  are  any  actual  syllogisms  in  play,  but  because  in  reaching 
what  to  consciousness  is  pleasant,  it  reaches  what  to  nature  is  fit, — as  if 
it  knew  and  planned  the  utility  of  its  behavior.  It  is  hardly  supposed 
by  those  who  use  this  phrase  that  pleasantness  is  a  dim  recognition  of 
the  fact  of  fitness:  this  would  be  to  reduce  the  value  called  pleasant¬ 
ness  to  a  function  of  a  cognition, — a  highly  speculative  procedure,  to 
say  the  least.  We  certainly  have  no  need  to  assume  that  what  con¬ 
sciousness  means  by  its  end  is  coincident  with  what  ‘nature’  means; 
it  may  be  far  simpler,  and  yet  none  the  less  real. 


108 


THE  NATURAL  MAN 


the  standpoint  of  nature  seems  instrumental  becomes, 
when  we  take  a  truly  psychological  instead  of  a  biologi¬ 
cal  view  of  the  object  of  value,  the  substance  of  the  end 
itself.  Instinct,  too,  in  the  last  analysis  can  be  under¬ 
stood  as  a  wholly  ideal  activity, — an  activity  of  ideas. 
If  there  is  any  virtue  in  giving  a  name  to  the  ultimate 
stuff  of  human  nature,  it  would  be  more  like  thought 
than  like  physical  energy ;  and,  if  I  may  venture  a  final 
leap  of  speculation,  more,  I  believe,  like  conversation 
than  like  solitary  thought. 

The  body  is  the  symbol  of  the  mind,  not  the  mind  of 
the  body.  The  mind  is  the  substance  of  which  the  body 
and  its  energies  are  the  visible  behavior-language, 
the  accessible  and  measurable  signs,  but  still, — the 
shadows.  What  ideas  they  are  that  enter  into  this  origi¬ 
nal  stuff  we  do  not  here  enquire  in  detail.  But  one  ques¬ 
tion  we  can  no  longer  postpone.  We  have  made  no  place 
for  a  moral  quality  in  original  human  nature ;  yet  it  is 
by  this  quality  that  man,  according  to  an  ancient  tra¬ 
dition,  is  thought  to  be  chiefly  distinguished.  This  ques¬ 
tion  is  the  subject  for  our  next  study. 


PART  III 


CONSCIENCE 


CHAPTER  XIII 
THE  INTEREST  IN  JUSTICE 


WHEN  Aristotle  said  that  man  is  by  nature  a 
political  animal,  he  did  not  leave  this  notable 
saying  nninterpreted.  It  is  the  faculty  of  speech,  he  ex¬ 
plains,  which  marks  man  for  a  civic  existence ;  and  by 
speech  we  are  to  understand  not  the  simple  power  to 
make  articulate  signs,  as  do  many  animal  species,  but 
the  power  to  coin  signs  for  general  ideas,  and  particu¬ 
larly  for  ideas  relating  to  justice  and  injustice.  We  may 
put  Aristotle’s  meaning  in  this  way:  the  communities 
which  men  make  are  political  communities,  as  distinct 
from  simple  defensive  or  co-operative  aggregations, 
because  men  are  fitted  by  nature  to  frame  ideas  of  fair 
and  unfair  dealing,  of  right  and  wrong,  and  to  use  them. 
The  life  of  an  idea  consists  in  being  recognized  and 
applied  in  the  concrete ;  a  state  is  a  community  in  which 
the  idea  of  justice  has  a  chance  for  life. 

We  need  not  debate  here  the  question  of  priority, — 
i.e.,  whether  political  society  exists  for  the  sake  of  a 
morally  reasoned  life,  or  whether  the  moral  reason 
exists  for  the  sake  of  a  political  society.  Biological  in¬ 
terpretations  of  human  life  would  prefer  the  second 
alternative,  at  least  as  a  preliminary  hypothesis.  I  shall 
simply  point  out  in  passing  that  a  psychological  inter¬ 
pretation  would  have  much  to  say  for  Aristotle’s  way 
of  putting  it. 


112 


CONSCIENCE 


For  our  social  impulses,  when  we  examine  them,  can 
be  seen  to  depend  to  a  large  extent  upon  a  need  to  put 
our  various  thinking  powers  into  operation.  We  have 
spoken  of  sociability  as  if  it  were  an  instinct  by  itselfr 
and  of  curiosity  as  if  it  were  another  instinct  by  itself. 
But  if  we  should  subtract  from  the  natural  interest  in 
social  life  whatever  comes  through  the  enquiring  sides 
of  argument  and  conversation,  and  through  persuading 
others,  managing  and  planning  for  others,  we  should 
deal  sociability  a  severe  blow.  And  if  we  should  sub¬ 
tract  from  our  natural  interest  in  public  life — the  po¬ 
litical  development  of  sociability — whatever  comes 
from  the  discussion  of  personalities,  laws,  principles,, 
quarrels,  wars,  strands  of  history,  legend,  custom,  on 
their  ethical  side,  we  should  lose  much  of  its  normal 
motive.  Political  life  is,  as  Aristotle  later  described  it,, 
an  arena  for  distinguished  action,  a  conspicuous  j  oust¬ 
ing-place  for  contending  principles  and  men  having 
much  energy  to  discharge.  And  if  you  will  watch  where 
the  interest  is  hottest  you  will  see  that  it  is  there  where 
questions  of  expediency,  of  bread  and  butter  and  pros¬ 
perity,  have  merged  into  questions  of  rights  and  obliga¬ 
tions  ;  or  where  questions  of  a  man’s  ability  and  record 
have  deepened  into  questions  of  his  character  and 
honor.  It  is  there  where  the  responses  of  indignation,, 
chivalry,  applause,  resentment,  loyalty,  condemnation, 
the  responses  of  our  ethical  nature,  have  been  called 
out.  We  are  social  and  political  creatures,  at  least  in 
part,  because  we  need  to  inject  our  reasons  and  our 
moral  perceptions  into  the  world’s  work.  We  build 


THE  INTEREST  IN  JUSTICE 


113 


states,  at  least  in  part,  because  of  this  will  to  power. 
So  far  we  can  follow  Aristotle.1 

But  here  our  question  arises.  If  this  particular  form 
of  mental  activity  is  characteristic  of  the  species,  and 
helps  to  produce  such  distinctive  products  as  laws  and 
states  (surely  as  indicative  of  man  as  the  habits  and 
homes  of  the  beasts),  we  must  find  some  place  for  it  in 
original  human  nature.  Shall  we  say  that  there  is  a 
native  moral  sense  in  man,  a  moral  instinct ;  or  if  these 
expressions  are  inept,  what  account  shall  we  give  of 
the  untaught  value  which  humanity  places  upon  jus¬ 
tice!  It  is  usual  for  writers  who  view  instinct  in  terms 
of  situation  and  response  not  to  include  moral  behavior 
among  the  original  tendencies,  but  to  regard  it  as  de¬ 
rivative  and  composite.  It  could  be  thought  to  develop 
in  the  form  of  altruistic  sentiment  from  the  maternal 
instinct  (Sutherland) ;  or  from  pugnacity,  as  pugnacity 
becomes  a  ‘ disinterested  resentment’  (Westermarck) 
turned  first  outward  and  then  inward.  For  McDougall 

i  And  we  may  also  agree  in  the  place  that  he  gives  to  speech.  That 
impulse  to  1 1  vocalization  ’  ’  which  we  included  among  our  units  of  be¬ 
havior  would  not  exist  in  us  as  it  does  unless  it  were  destined  to  take 
part  in  a  more  comprehensive  tendency.  Thorndike  very  justly  observes 
that  it  first  appears  as  an  aimless  impulse  ( The  Original  Nature  of 
Man ,  pp.  135-138) ;  but  it  is  one  of  the  common  facts  of  our  more 
elaborate  tendencies  that  their  ingredients  assemble  themselves  in  sepa¬ 
rate  and  leisurely  manner  in  the  course  of  growth.  It  is  quite  compatible 
with  its  primitive  aimlessness  that  the  talking  impulse  should  be  a  part 
of  some  more  general  tendency,  be  it  reason,  sociability,  or  ‘the  political 
faculty. ; 

Behaviorism  would  read  the  relation  the  other  way  around.  Thus  John 
R.  Watson  ( Behavior ,  1914,  pp.  321,  319) :  “The  lack  of  language  habits 
forever  differentiates  brute  from  man”;  remarking,  “We  say  nothing 
of  reasoning  since  we  do  not  admit  this  as  a  genuine  type  of  human 
behavior  except  as  a  special  form  of  language  habit.” 


114 


CONSCIENCE 


moral  judgment  is  a  complex  attitude  in  which  the  ‘  self- 
regarding  sentiment/  interacting  with  social  likes  and 
dislikes,  has  the  chief  role.  Thorndike  does  not  posi¬ 
tively  exclude  it  from  our  native  endowment,  but  so  far 
fails  to  verify  its  presence.  He  says  ( The  Original  Na¬ 
ture  of  Man,  p.  202) :  “No  innate  difference  of  response 
to  ‘  right  ’  from  ‘  wrong  ’  acts  is  listed  here,  in  spite  of 
the  opinions  of  a  majority  of  students  of  ethics,  and  the 
authority  of  Lloyd  Morgan,  who  says  emphatically : 

Among  civilized  people  conscience  is  innate.  Intuitions  of 
right  and  wrong  are  a  part  of  that  moral  nature  which  we 
have  inherited  from  our  forefathers.  Just  as  we  inherit  com¬ 
mon  sense,  an  instinctive  judgment  in  intellectual  matters, 
so  too  do  we  inherit  that  instinctive  judgment  in  matters  of 
right  and  wrong  which  forms  an  important  element  in  con¬ 
science  ( ’85,  p.  307). 

♦ 

So  much,  however,  is  clear :  that  no  account  of  human 
nature  can  pretend  to  have  touched  the  important 
points  unless  it  shows,  in  terms  of  its  own  theory,  how 
it  is  that  a  man  can  become  what  we  call  a  moral  agent, 
or  a  political  animal.  And  we  have  a  double  concern  in 
this  subject,  since  the  human  conscience  is  at  once,  in 
some  sort  of  germ,  deposited  in  man’s  original  nature, 
and  at  the  same  time  one  of  the  chief  instruments  in 
his  remaking.  What  account,  then,  can  we  give  of  the 
moral  aspect  of  human  nature  1 


CHAPTER  XIV 


CONSCIENCE  AND  THE  GENERAL  WILL 

THERE  is  no  need  to  assume  an  original  moral 
sense  in  order  to  account  for  the  expression, 4  4  You 
ought,’ ’  or  at  least  for  some  closely  similar  expression. 
If  human  nature  is  equipped  with  instincts  such  as  we 
have  described,  and  with  the  preferences  that  go  with 
them,  and  if  these  interests  are  mightily  affected  by 
the  neighbor’s  behavior,  a  generalizing  animal  would 
hardly  fail  to  perceive  the  value  of  an  habitual  dispo¬ 
sition  on  the  neighbor’s  part  to  consider  the  feelings  of 
others ;  and  a  language-using  animal  would  hardly  fail 
to  invent  a  term  to  express  to  his  neighbor  his  sense  of 
the  importance  of  that  disposition.  What  most  of  us 
strongly  prefer  you  should  do  would  inevitably  be  con¬ 
veyed  to  you  by  a  phrase  such  as, “  You  ought  to  behave 
thus  and  so,  ’ n  in  which  the  ‘  ought’  would  imply  that  this 
line  of  conduct  is  such  as  would  follow  from  the  fixed 
habit  of  4  consideration.  ’  It  would  remind  you  simply  of 
a  certain  permanent  condition  of  peaceable  living,  that 

i 1  Inevitably,  ’  I  say :  but  note  that  this  word  ‘  inevitably  ’  assumes 
that  it  would  occur  to  us,  instead  of  simply  growling  at  your  encroach¬ 
ments,  to  appeal  to  your  intelligence  and  self-control.  This  is  a  large 
assumption,  and  may  be  found  to  be  the  whole  genetic  question.  Such 
an  appeal  is  used  only  when  the  addressee  is  supposed  free  and  com¬ 
petent,  i.e.,  something  of  a  psychologist,  as  we  said.  And  conversely, 
only  then  can  the  members  of  a  group  be  treated  as  free,  when  they  can 
be  approached  with  an  ‘ought. 1 


116 


CONSCIENCE 


of  being  a  reasonably  good  practising  psychologist  in 
regard  to  the  interest  of  others. 

Every  inducement  would  exist  for  an  attempt  on 
the  part  of  your  fellows  to  give  your  permanent  habits 
a  shape  auspicious  for  them.  For  this  work  they  would 
hardly  be  content  with  the  pressure  of  the  ordi¬ 
nary  atmosphere  of  approval  and  disapproval, — if  a 
stronger  pressure  were  available.  They  would  gather 
all  possible  prestige  about  this  notion  of  “You  ought.” 
They  would  presumably  call  upon  the  instinct  of  fear, 
heightened  by  such  religious  or  other  imagination  as 
could  be  pressed  into  service,  to  aid  in  the  shaping  of 
the  other  instincts.  There  would  be,  as  there  is,  a  shade 
of  menace  in  the  attitude  with  which  the  ‘ought’  bears 
down  upon  you.  And  there  would  also  be,  as  there  is, 
a  vigorous  enlistment  of  the  ‘  self-regarding  sentiment’ 
through  the  general  refusal  to  permit  the  man  of  re¬ 
fractory  habits  to  think  well  of  himself. 

Everyone  would  thus  acquire  a  high  interest  in  ac¬ 
cepting  the  guidance  of  the  social  ‘ought’;  and  if  not 
everyone,  yet  everyone ’s  progeny,  would  end  by  taking 
the  interested  spectator  as  well  as  the  disinterested 
spectator  into  his  own  bosom,  seeing  himself  habitually 
through  the  eye  of  the  social  judgment,  and  assigning 
a  certain  authority  to  that  judgment,  together  with  his 
own.  The  moral  Rubicon  is  crossed  when  once  the  ques¬ 
tion  is  admitted  as  legitimate,  “What  sort  am  I?”  And 
the  persistent  presence  of  social  reaction,  with  a  little 
generalization,  would  most  reasonably  be  admitted  to 
raise  this  question  in  the  mind  of  each  member,  and  to 


CONSCIENCE  AND  THE  GENERAL  WILL  117 

keep  it  there,  even  if  it  succeeded  in  lodging  no  per¬ 
manent  standards  for  answering  it. 

Given,  then,  a  being  with  a  social  instinct,  and  under 
the  kind  of  social  pressure  we  have  described,  some 
vocabulary  analogous  to  the  ‘ ought’  vocabulary  could 
he  conceived  to  arise  and  something  like  conscience  to 
emerge,  without  appealing  to  any  original  moral  de¬ 
posit  in  human  nature.  But  would  this  socially  moulded 
4 conscience’  be  identical  with  conscience  as  we  know  it! 
The  resemblance  is,  in  reality,  superficial.  It  is  impos¬ 
sible  that  the  ‘ ought’  as  we  mean  it  in  its  current  use 
should  he  a  social  product,  as  will  appear  if  we  con¬ 
sider  how  the  meaning  of  this  word  is  ordinarily 
conveyed. 

No  doubt  children  listen  with  frequent  perplexity  to 
the  abundant  You-oughts  which  are  offered  them.  No 
doubt  they  have  to  learn  this  word  as  they  learn  other 
words  for  invisible  things :  making  the  assumption  that 
some  meaning  it  must  have,  since  the  grown  world  uses 
it;  noting  the  circumstances  in  which  it  is  employed, 
the  accompanying  frowns,  rewards,  and  other  appeals 
and  sanctions ;  then  devising  various  hypotheses  about 
its  meaning  until  some  one  seems  to  fit  the  cases  and 
survive.  The  history  of  the  mastering  of  this  word  is 
not  outwardly  different  from  the  history  of  the  master¬ 
ing  of  other  difficult  words :  it  is  late  in  finding  a  firm 
place  in  the  mind.  But  when  it  arrives,  there  is  a  clear 
distinction  in  meaning  between  “I  ought  to  do  thus  and 
so”  and  “It  would  be  prudent  for  me  because  others 
prefer  it.  ”  This  distinction  has  been  called  out  by  some¬ 
thing  in  the  attitude  of  the  person  who  uses  “You 


118 


CONSCIENCE 


ought”  not  noted  in  the  foregoing  derivation.  The 
“You  ought”  is  neither  a  command,  nor  an  item  of 
information  concerning  the  general  will.  The  reaction 
to  one  who  is  supposed  to  have  violated  the  “You 
ought  ’  ’  is  not  one  of  simple  anger ;  it  has  an  ingredient 
of  regret.  It  addresses  itself  not  alone  to  his  future 
discretion,  hut  also  to  his  past  decision :  it  deplores  the 
process  by  which  he  reached  his  choice.  It  assumes, 
rightly  or  not,  that  he  was  capable  of  a  better  process, 
and  that  he  knows  it.  In  brief,  the  “You  ought”  ad¬ 
dresses  itself  to  an  answering  “I  ought”  within;  and 
unless  the  “I  ought”  responds,  it  has  missed  its  target. 
This  “I  ought,”  since  it  is  presupposed  in  the  meaning 
of  “You  ought,”  cannot  be  conveyed  from  without  by 
means  of  the  “You  ought.”  It  can  only  find  its  way  into 
our  sign-language  by  being  taken  as  understood.2  While 
we  ply  our  moral  epithets,  we  wait  anxiously  and  all 
but  helplessly  for  evidence  that  our  meaning  has  struck 
home :  for  we  know  that  every  new  person  must  find  this 
angle  of  vision  for  himself.  The  social  use  of  tha  word 
is  thus  never  purely  instructive:  it  is  also,  and  pri¬ 
marily,  awakening.  It  appeals  to  a  strand  of  self -judg¬ 
ment  which  is  original  with  every  individual,  and  in 
this  sense  belongs  to  original  human  nature. 

2  In  establishing  a  system  of  signs,  there  are  always  certain  signs 
which  cannot  be  mutually  agreed  upon,  since  in  order  to  agree  upon  any 
sign,  certain  other  signs  must  be  used  as  already  understood.  These 
must  be  thrown  out  as  hopeful  ventures,  and  confirmed  first  by  the  nod 
of  understanding,  then  by  successful  use.  The  sign  for  1  ought  ’  is  in 
this  position. 


CHAPTER  XV 


CONSCIENCE  AND  INSTINCT 

IP  the  moral  point  of  view  must  be  achieved  by  each 
mind  for  itself,  may  the  tendency  to  do  this  he  re¬ 
garded  as  an  instinct  among  the  other  instincts  ? 

It  is  conceivable  that  the  inner  scruple,  finally 
aroused  by  the  moral  batteries  of  our  early  environ¬ 
ment,  is  itself  an  inherited  relic  of  ancestral  experi¬ 
ence  (giving  Spencer  the  benefit  of  the  doubt  about 
the  methods  of  heredity).  According  to  Lippert,  who 
certainly  improves  upon  Spencer’s  psychology,  the 
race  has  acquired  a  group  of  “secondary  instincts,” 
acting  as  counterbalances  for  the  more  violent  of  our 
primitive  impulses,  those  of  pugnacity,  sex,  and  ac¬ 
quisition;  and  these  comparatively  new  tendencies  to 
respect  and  refrain  are  the  essential  ingredients  of 
conscience.  From  the  Darwinian  standpoint,  it  ap¬ 
pears  reasonable  enough  that  only  men  in  whom  these 
primary  instincts  were  well  mated  and  checked  could 
form  stable  societies,  and  hand  their  natures  down  to 
us.  Conscience  would  then  be  fairly  regarded  as  the 
last  touch  in  the  process  of  balancing  human  instincts. 

Without  doubting  that  certain  specific  inhibitions, 
such  as  shame  or  the  indisposition  to  inflict  bodily 
injury,  may  be  accounted  for  in  this  way,  conscience 
itself  is  certainly  not  this  kind  of  instinct.  Our  sense 
of  ought  does  not  limit  itself  to  any  ancient  categories 


120 


CONSCIENCE 


of  behavior.  It  does  not  behave  like  an  echo  of  racial 
experience,  bnt  lights  npon  new  types  of  action  as 
keenly  as  npon  old  types:  it  impels  the  return  of  ‘con¬ 
science  money  ’  quite  as  clearly  as  it  provokes  remorse 
for  murder.  It  seeks  out  its  own  applications,  and  is 
capable  of  a  development  like  the  sense  of  beauty, 
rising  in  some  persons  to  the  point  of  genius.  Further, 
it  is  not  attached  unchangeably  to  any  specific  types 
of  behavior  at  all,  whether  new  or  old.  Its  demands 
have  a  more  general  character,  and  descend  upon  par¬ 
ticular  actions  only  through  a  process  of  subsuming. 
The  grain  of  truth  in  the  wild  assertion  that  “the 
mores  can  make  anything  right’ ’  is  sufficient  to  dis¬ 
credit  the  view  that  the  moral  sense  consists  of  a  set 
of  acquired  reactions  to  specific  situations. 

If  there  is  anything  innate  in  conscience  it  must  be 
sought  in  whatever  about  it  is  characteristic  of  the 
species,  i.e.  (in  other  words),  unchangeable  and  uni¬ 
versal.  And  if  all  branches  of  the  human  family  have 
a  conscience,  there  is  at  least  so  much  that  is  univer¬ 
sal,  despite  all  variations  in  the  particular  scruples 
it  adopts.1  And  we  should  be  able  to  indicate  certain 
very  general  traits  of  moral  behavior  which  are  con- 

i  If  one  should  answer  the  thoroughgoing  relativist  that  amid  all 
variations  in  the  moral  code  there  was  always  a  moral  code,  the  answer 
might  justly  be  called  empty  and  formal.  But  the  criticism  is  irrele¬ 
vant:  the  answer,  empty  and  formal  as  it  is,  is  sufficient.  To  refute 
absurdities,  one  falls  back  on  formalities.  So  if  it  should  be  said  that 
all  moral  codes  have  at  least  one  common  content,  that  of  approving 
mutual  benefit  above  mutual  injury, — the  statement  would  properly  be 
called  a  banality.  But  the  proper  function  of  a  banal  truth  is  to  meet 
a  banal  error,  such  as  this  that  because  things  vary  there  is  no  constant 
element  in  them. 


CONSCIENCE  AND  INSTINCT 


121 


stant  throughout  these  variations.  Thus,  while  cus¬ 
toms  vary  enormously,  conscience  is  generally  inclined 
to  set  a  value  upon  custom.  And  while  totem  gods  and 
other  gods  give  extraordinarily  different  commands, 
the  tendency  of  conscience  to  respect  these  commands 
is  always  there.  We  should  come  near  to  stating  a 
universal  trait  of  conscience  if  we  took  what  is  com¬ 
mon  to  both  these  cases, — the  disposition  to  find  an 
object  of  devotion,  and  to  set  this  object  up  as  authority 
in  details  of  conduct,  finding  what  one  ‘  ought  ’  to  do 
not  directly  but  indirectly  through  suggestions  from 
this  source, — he  it  family  head,  totem,  ruler,  god,  cus¬ 
tom,  or  law. 

Thus  conscience  behaves  somewhat  like  a  general 
instinct,  craving  an  object  of  loyalty.  It  finds  these 
objects  through  its  social  context,  and  so  is  a  close  ally 
of  the  social  instinct.  Indeed,  every  associate  is  prob¬ 
ably  to  some  degree  a  moral  authority,  though  the  dis¬ 
position  to  centralize  the  sources  of  suggestion  is 
marked.  But  conscience  is  not  identical  with  socia¬ 
bility.  It  is  not  seeking  neighbors,  but  authorities :  and 
while  it  seems  to  light  on  the  objects  of  its  devotion 
often  with  an  unreasoned  tact,  and  adhere  to  them  with 
a  blindness  that  savors  of  the  tropism,  it  does  not 
authoritatively  accept  its  authorities.  It  chooses  them 
with  the  same  originality  as  hunger  shows  in  the  selec¬ 
tion  of  foods ;  it  chooses  what  satisfies  itself,  not  what 
satisfies  the  tribe.  It  is  convenient  and  usual  that  one 
can  worship  where  his  tribesmen  worship,  and  eat 
where  and  what  his  tribesmen  eat;  but  the  hunger  in 
each  case  is  one’s  own.  What  the  authority  does  is  to 


122 


CONSCIENCE 


eke  out  the  resources  of  the  spark  of  moral  originality 
in  each  individual,  so  that  it  can  perform  the  task  of 
regulating  a  whole  life-full  of  actions.  In  custom,  law, 
and  religious  precept,  we  find  not  so  much  other  men’s 
consciences  as  the  remainder  of  our  own.  The  same 
motive  that  leads  to  the  adoption  of  authority  may 
lead  to  its  rejection,  and  the  setting  up  of  conscience 
versus  custom,  etc.  Thus,  the  authority- seeking  trait 
is  symptomatic  of  conscience,  and  is  well-nigh  uni¬ 
versal  ;  but  it  is  not  conscience  itself. 

The  essential  and  universal  thing  about  conscience, 
in  fact,  seems  to  set  it  apart  from  all  other  innate  tend¬ 
encies.  For  conscience  is  the  principal  inner  agency 
for  the  remaking  of  human  nature ;  hence  it  must  stand 
as  a  critic  over  against  everything  that  is  to  be  remade, 
and  so  over  against  all  instincts.  It  plays  the  part  of 
censor,  for  the  most  part  permissive,  and  hence  silent : 
but  de  jure  it  is  cognizant  of  every  act  of  will,  and  of 
the  total  policy  of  the  self.  All  that  belongs  to  the  will, 
including  every  form  of  the  will  to  power,  must  be 
bringable  under  its  scrutiny:  it  might  appear,  then, 
that  conscience  is  not  itself  any  part  of  the  will,  —cer¬ 
tainly  not  an  instinct, — but  something  outside  of  all 
these,  like  self-consciousness  pure  and  simple.  On  this 
showing,  original  human  nature  would  contain,  besides 
all  its  instincts,  something  different  from  instinct,  a 
self-consciousness  applying  certain  standards  of  value 
to  the  control  of  behavior. 

But  if  so,  what  is  the  nature  of  these  standards,  and 
what  is  their  source!  Are  they  something  uniquely 


CONSCIENCE  AND  INSTINCT 


123 


different  from  the  will  to  power,  and  possibly  opposed 
to  it  now  and  then?  Or  is  the  standard  simply  the  whole 
will  to  power  itself  in  its  most  adequate  and  far-sighted 
interpretation? 

My  own  view  is  that  conscience  stands  outside  the 
instinctive  life  of  man,  not  as  something  separate,  but 
as  an  awareness  of  the  success  or  failure  of  that  life 
in  maintaining  its  status  and  its  growth.  It  is  a  safe¬ 
guard  of  the  power  at  any  time  achieved.  It  interposes 
a  check  when  an  act  is  proposed  which  threatens 
1  integrity.  ’  What  conscience  recognizes  is  that  certain 
behavior  increases  our  hold  on  reality  while  certain 
other  behavior  diminishes  that  hold,  constitutes  what 
the  old  Southern  Buddhist  called  an  asava,  a  leak.  The 
remark  of  conscience  is:  4 ‘That  course,  or  that  act, 
promises  to  build,  or  threatens  to  tear  down,  what  you 
metaphysically  are.”2  Conscience  is  native  to  human 
nature  in  the  sense  that  it  is  within  the  capacity  of 
human  nature  to  be  thus  self-conscious  in  perceiving 
and  controlling  its  own  cosmic  direction.  It  is  not  an 
instinct.  It  is  the  latest  and  finest  instrument  for  the 
self -integration  of  instinct.  And  it  is  an  instrument 
characteristically  human. 


2  Conscience  can  come  into  existence  only  when  such  an  increase  or 
decrease  of  being  could  itself  become  an  object  of  perception.  One  can 
be  stronger  or  weaker,  fresher  or  wearier,  without  noticing  the  fact; 
if  it  occurs  to  one  to  remark  on  his  own  condition,  that  is  a  turn  of  expe¬ 
rience  analogous  to  conscience.  In  structure,  it  must  take  a  form  such 
that  some  higher  differential  of  the  whole  nervous  process  at  the  center 
becomes  available  in  regulating  that  process.  See  an  article  by  the 
author  in  The  Psychological  Bulletin,  May  15,  1908,  “  Theory  of  Value 
and  Conscience  in  their  Biological  Context.  ’  ’ 


124 


CONSCIENCE 


If  we  are  right  in  thus  placing  conscience  npon  the 
growing  edge  of  human  nature,  we  can  understand  the 
importance  which  men  have  assigned  to  its  working. 
While  the  occasional  ciphering  of  many  another  innate 
tendency  passes  without  comment,  the  world  has  made 
a  particular  tradition  of  the  failures  of  conscience,  and 
has  bewailed  them  as  the  essential  failure  of  man.  In¬ 
tellectual  blunders  it  adjusts  itself  to  with  compara¬ 
tive  resignation.  Against  moral  errors  it  renews  its 
warfare  from  day  to  day. 

Our  description  of  conscience  so  far  has  been  rather 
to  locate  it  than  to  interpret  it.  Our  conception  is  still 
vague.  Perhaps  we  shall  always  understand  our  moral 
faculty  better  on  its  negative  than  on  its  positive  side. 
For  it  is  in  dealing  with  ‘sin’  that  the  moral  native 
comes  to  its  most  vigorous  and  definite  expression. 


CHAPTER  XVI 


CURRENT  FALLACIES  REGARDING  SIN 

IF  a  man  is  caught  in  a  lie,  the  discoverer  commonly 
feels  justified  in  calling  him  a  liar.  There  is  obvi¬ 
ously  a  large  logical  distance  between  the  discovered 
fact  and  the  appellation.  It  is  something  more  than  an 
inductive  leap  from  the  single  lie  to  a  lying  habit :  it  is 
a  reference  of  the  habit  to  a  flaw  in  the  moral  substance 
“of  the  individual.  To  call  a  man  a  liar  is  to  make  a 
metaphysical  assertion. 

If  this  logical  leap  can  be  justified,  it  is  by  aid  of  the 
premiss  that  unless  the  flaw  existed,  the  single  lie  would 
be  impossible.  Character  is  a  disposition  which  makes 
a  person  ‘ incapable  of’  this  and  that:  it  sets  up  univer¬ 
sal  negatives.  If  a  person  lapses  at  any  time,  it  is  obvi¬ 
ous  that  he  was  ‘ capable’  of  that  lapse.  Hence  he  who 
has  ever  stolen  is  a  thief ;  and  one  indiscretion  is  enough 
to  establish  a  woman’s  permanent  status. 

These  fragments  of  moral  logic  are  common  enough 
in  the  form  of  unexamined  attitudes,  sentiments,  preju¬ 
dices.  We  do  not  as  commonly  recognize  them  for 
what  they  are, — forms  of  the  ancient  Oriental  infer¬ 
ence  to  the  effect  that  he  who  has  sinned  is  fallen,  is  a 
sinner.  When  we  inspect  this  argument  in  its  magnifi¬ 
cent  sweep,  we  incline  to  shrink  from  it.  Many  repudiate 
it  in  toto;  though  the  repudiation  is  for  the  most  part 


126 


CONSCIENCE 


rather  a  hygienic  and  educational  maxim — a  pragmatic 
reaction  from  the  morbid  agonies  of  Calvinistic  tradi¬ 
tion — than  a  theoretical  criticism  of  the  inference  itself. 

Yet  the  healthier  mind  of  our  time  would  be  disposed, 
I  think,  to  reject  also  the  theory  of  the  argument,  “A 
sin  shows  a  sinner.  ’  ’  A  sin  may  show  an  individual  un¬ 
duly  strained  or  unduly  depressed.  The  distribution 
of  blame  is  at  least  as  difficult  a  problem  as  the  distri¬ 
bution  of  wealth.  The  head  of  a  woman’s  prison  tells 
me  that  her  murderesses  are,  as  a  class,  her  best  citi¬ 
zens.  As  men  grow  wise,  the  judgment  of  moral  censure 
tends  to  be  replaced  by  the  judgment  of  misfit :  if  some¬ 
one  has  gone  wrong,  it  is  very  likely  that  he  is  in  the 
wrong  place;  give  him  the  right  work  and  the  right 
neighborhood,  and  going  right  follows  of  its  own  ac¬ 
cord.  Or,  what  we  call  sin  may  be  an  incident  in  the 
normal  process  of  groping  our  way  into  our  place.  No¬ 
body  can  do  anything  righter,  we  think,  than  live  out 
his  powers,  his  instincts,  conduct  strongly  the  great 
adventure,  a  soul-building  process  which  must  lead 
through  an  occasional  swamp  as  well  as  over  mountain 
highways.  ‘ 4  Through  angers,  losses,  ambition,  igno¬ 
rance,  ennui,  what  you  are  picks  its  way.”  When  we 
think  of  “  what  you  are,”  as  Walt  Whitman  does,  under 
the  figure  of  a  substance,  the  notion  of  sin  reduces  to 
that  of  aberration  in  an  orbit,  a  quantitative  matter, 
for  the  most  part  merely  the  extravagance  of  your  vir¬ 
tues.  Instead  of  thinking  that  a  sin  shows  a  sinner,  shall 
we  not  say  that  a  sin,  taken  by  itself,  shows  nothing  at 

all? 

.  « 

In  truth,  there  are  signs  of  bewilderment  in  our  cur- 


CURRENT  FALLACIES  REGARDING  SIN  127 

rent  moral  judgments  on  this  point.  We  see  clearly  „ 
that  there  is  something  disproportionately  dark  in  the 
thoughts  of  Augustine  and  his  followers;  we  do  not 
see  clearly  what  to  put  in  their  place.  General  amnesty 
is  hardly  more  successful  than  general  condemnation 
of  the  race.  Let  me  try  to  get  rid  of  the  idea  of  guilt, 
substituting  for  it  the  idea  of  illness  or  misfortune. 
Let  me  take  into  my  employ  a  man  with  a  6  record,  ’  be¬ 
lieving  that  society  is  part-responsible  for  every  crime, 
— I  find  that  I  feel  far  more  confidence  for  the  future 
if  my  unfortunate  brother  condemns  himself  than  if 
he  chimes  in  too  heartily  with  my  own  point  of  view. 
There  is  a  margin  of  indulgence  in  the  moral  bookkeep¬ 
ing  of  society,  perhaps  also  of  the  universe,  and  all  of 
us  profit  by  it ;  yet  if  anyone  demands  this  indulgence 
as  a  right,  he  disqualifies  himself.  If  we  think  we  can 
omit  the  moral  sermon  and  substitute  the  hygienic 
measure  or  the  change  of  place,  we  find  the  rebuke  is 
still  implied  in  the  need  for  these  measures :  the  4  ought  ’ 
is  none  the  less  active  for  not  being  verbally  invoked. 
The  sense  of  sin  seems  to  have  at  least  so  much  prag¬ 
matic  force, — it  does  not  quite  work  to  omit  it x  as  a 
prevalent  modern  attitude  tries  to  do. 

I  presume  that  both  the  Calvinistic  and  this  modem 
attitude  are  wrong,  and  for  similar  reasons:  one  as¬ 
sumes  that  wrong  cancels  merit,  the  other  that  merit 
cancels  wrong,  like  the  positive  and  negative  numbers 
of  algebra.  This,  I  venture  to  think,  is  a  fundamental 
fallacy.  It  is  much  as  if  we  should  balance  off  the  black 
of  one  part  of  a  picture  against  the  white  of  another 


128 


CONSCIENCE 


part  and  declare  the  whole  a  muddy  gray.  Nothing 
is  more  natural  than  to  feel  one  is  making  up  for 
a  wrong  by  good  offices  of  some  sort,  or  that  a  misstep 
is  destroying  a  good  record;  but  the  result  of  such  a 
balancing  process  is  that  our  moral  self-consciousness 
tends  to  become  nondescript.  We  tend  to  revert  to  the 
simpler  state  of  mind  in  which  we  have  no  more  moral 
qualities,  but  simply  are.  There  is  relief  in  this  rever¬ 
sion,  but  as  an  abandonment  of  a  theoretical  difficulty 
it  is  not  a  place  to  remain  in.  The  difficulty  has  a 
solution. 

The  solution  lies,  I  believe,  in  a  simple  distinction 
between  the  logic  of  physical  things  and  the  logic  of 
consciousness.  It  is  characteristic  of  physical  nature 
that  algebraic  opposites  neutralize  one  another:  acid 
and  base  combine  in  a  neutral  salt.  It  is  equally  char¬ 
acteristic  of  consciousness  to  retain  both  components 
without  neutralization :  it  is  this  which  gives  conscious¬ 
ness  its  ‘  depth.  ’  Thus,  in  the  physical  world,  all  that  is 
real  is  present:  the  past  exists  only  in  the  form  of 
present  traces,  records,  ruins,  hereditary  dispositions, 
brain  paths,  momenta, — so  many  present  facts.  The 
geological  past  is  typical,  existing  in  the  order  and 
shape  of  contemporary  rocks  and  scratches.  But  in 
consciousness  the  past  retains  its  character  as  past :  the 
glacial  moraine  calls  up  to  it  something  which  no  longer 
exists  in  nature;  and  the  depth  of  memory,  the  journey 
of  thought  as  it  reads  its  own  strata, — the  journey  from 
the  present  to  the  beginning  and  back  again, — is  one  of 
the  dimensions  of  a  mind.  For  physical  purposes,  two 
equal  and  opposite  farces  produce  a  resultant  zero.  For 


CURRENT  FALLACIES  REGARDING  SIN  129 

consciousness,  two  equal  and  opposite  efforts  remain 
two  and  opposite :  in  the  state  of  deadlock  or  equipoise, 
the  elements  do  not  lose  their  identity.  In  consciousness 
there  is  many  an  a  minus  a,  but  never  a  zero  nor  a 
neutral. 

This  principle  holds  good  for  the  moral  sense.  When 
we  fall  into  the  dull  optimism  which  ventures  to  hope 
that  after  all  deductions  there  will  still  he  a  moral  bal¬ 
ance  in  our  favor,  we  are  transferring  a  physical  cal¬ 
culus  which  our  fresher  judgments  know  nothing  of. 
When  a  fresh  wrong  has  to  be  dealt  with,  it  is  no  one’s 
first  impulse  to  check  it  off  against  all  previous  right¬ 
going  :  it  stands  by  itself  whole  and  intact, — the  right¬ 
going  falls  into  irrelevance,  for  after  all  why  should 
one  not  go  right?  And  when  there  is  a  deed  that  calls 
for  honor  or  thanks,  where  is  the  shabby  calculator 
who  brings  to  mind  the  offsetting  failures  or  mistakes! 
On  such  a  day,  the  critic  fearing  to  be  disloyal  to  his 
criticism  is  likely  to  join  half-heartedly  in  the  praise; 
unless  he  is  set  free  by  perceiving  the  fallacy  of  the 
process  of  balance.  The  deed  of  the  hero  is  not  dimmed 
by  his  crimes;  nor  are  his  crimes  wiped  out  by  his 
heroism.  Consciousness  is  not  a  cancelling  ground:  it 
is  the  region  in  which  opposites  are  preserved.  Charac¬ 
ter,  that  mysterious  entity  which  we  surmise  through 
single  deeds,  is  much  more  versatile  than  the  psychol¬ 
ogy  of  either  Calvin  or  Augustine  or  Pelagius  allows, 
‘capable  of’  harboring  many  an  unsolved  antithesis. 
But  a  corollary  of  this  truth  is,  that  with  all  our  good 
will  to  stand  up  for  ourselves  as  men  in  presence  of 


130 


CONSCIENCE 


the  Adamic  title  of  ‘  sinner, ’  that  epithet  and  its  logic 
remain  as  something  to  he  reckoned  with. 

But  our  disinclination  to  hear  much  of  sin  has  other 
roots  than  the  fallacy  of  cancellation.  It  is  due  in  part 
to  the  fallacy  of  custom;  by  which  I  mean  that  the 
usualness  of  a  given  type  of  wrong-doing  diminishes 
the  psychological  sense  of  its  wrongfulness,  and  with 
our  increasing  knowledge  of  evil,  all  types  of  wrong¬ 
doing  appear  usual.  Our  knowledge  of  evil  to-day  is 
no  longer  the  knowledge  of  personal  experience  and 
hearsay;  it  is  the  knowledge  of  social  and  statistical 
science.  It  is  a  knowledge  spread  broadcast  by  jour¬ 
nalism,  by  a  literature  of  disillusionment,  and  even  by 
the  necessities  of  a  popular  government  which  makes 
every  man  responsible  for  knowing  how  the  other  half 
lives.  And  in  dealing  with  sin  through  all  our  insti¬ 
tutions  we  accept  a  sort  of  complicity  in  all  that  we 
know.  The  work  of  the  jnry  is  not  simply  to  discern 
the  external  fact  regarding  the  behavior  of  the  accused : 
the  jury  are  chosen  as  his  peers,  that  is,  as  those  who 
can  perceive  the  fact,  because  they  understand  his  will, 
being  of  like  circumstances  and  like  mind  with  him.  In 
truth,  the  villains  of  the  world  are  a  shade  more  compre¬ 
hensible  to  us  than  its  saints.  The  latter,  if  we  are  cyni¬ 
cal,  we  reduce  to  villains  in  disguise  in  order  to  under¬ 
stand  them.  If  we  accept  them  as  genuine,  we  account 
them  somewhat  more  than  human  and  endow  them  with 
a  halo  of  supernature.  The  real  villain  is  remarkable 
chiefly  for  the  absence  of  that  nimbus  of  mystery  which 
still  enwraps  the  common  man.  He  is  one  who  has 


CURRENT  FALLACIES  REGARDING  SIN  131 

yielded  to  the  obvious  reason,  the  universal  drag  to¬ 
ward  overt  advantage,  the  material  day  of  unmodified 
instinct.  Evil  is  the  thing  we  understand,  through  an 
unhindered  participation  in  its  motive. 

But  on  the  other  hand,  by  a  principle  of  human  psy¬ 
chology,  the  very  extent  of  our  knowledge  of  moral 
evil  tends  to  rob  of  tragedy  the  statement  that  “all 
men  are  sinners.”  The  sense  of  sin,  which  is  at  home 
in  the  solitude  of  individual  conscience,  can  hardly 
survive  in  the  universalizing  atmosphere.  There  is  no 
better  balm  for  the  conscience  of  the  nouveau  mauvais 
than  the  assurance  that  “everybody  does  it.”  Or  if  this 
cannot  be  said,  then  the  more  general,  “We  all  make 
our  mistakes,”  or  “To  err  is  human,”  may  be  used. 
It  is  a  general  principle  of  values  that  whatever  intro¬ 
duces  a  wider  horizon  into  an  experience,  such  as  Con¬ 
ceiving  it  as  the  common  lot,  sweetens  it  and  enhances 
its  worth.  It  is  for  this  reason,  in  part,  that  the  mores 
have  been  able  to  do  so  much  toward  making  the  un¬ 
couth  (an  ancient)  good.  But  beside  this,  every  man,  as 
we  were  saying,  is  something  of  a  moral  authority  to 
every  other ;  and  whatever  one  can  do  in  company,  or 
in  a  mob,  is  partly  removed  from  the  sphere  of  private 
judgment.  The  principle,  Judge  not  others  that  ye  be 
not  yourself  judged,  is  inverted  in  its  application:  in 
order  not  to  judge  others,  we  refrain  from  judging 
ourselves. 

This  checkage  of  moral  judgment  in  dealing  with 
common  errors  has  many  expressions.  The  touch  of 
nature  which  is  said  to  make  the  whole  world  kin  fre¬ 
quently  takes  the  form  of  confessing  a  common  weak- 


132 


CONSCIENCE 


ness.  Does  it  not  add  somewhat  to  ordinary  social 
negotiability  to  live  genially  with  the  minor  vices? — 
I  am  speaking  of  psychological  tendencies.  Men  incline 
to  meet  and  enjoy  each  other  4 at  the  sign’  of  their 
mutually  admitted  indulgences.  The  gaiety,  the  humor, 
the  color,  to  some  extent  the  art  of  the  world — not  to 
speak  of  the  world’s  fighting  and  the  world’s  work — 
seem  to  thrive  best  in  an  atmosphere  made  free  by 
mutual  agreement  that  the  censor  shall  be,  to  some 
extent,  suspended. 

This  is  by  no  means  pure  moral  blindness.  There  is 
soundness  in  the  common  judgment  before  which  the 
pharisee  has  always  come  off  less  well  than  the  publi¬ 
can.  The  righteousness  which  has  to  be  achieved  by 
insulating  one’s  sympathies  is  justly  suspected  of  ab¬ 
straction  and  so  far  of  unrighteousness.  In  the  effort 
after  virtue  there  is  a  genuine  paradox:  to  be  duly 
strenuous  in  the  pursuit,  and  to  retain  perfect  charity 
for  the  unstrenuous,  are  attitudes  difficult  to  combine. 
By  general  consent  mankind  seems  to  prefer  the  kindly 
soul — if  mankind  must  choose — to  the  more  consistent 
moral  aristocrat.  In  Bohemia,  the  humane  breadth  of 
common  weakness,  its  liberating  and  inspiriting  fra¬ 
ternity,  appear  to  deprive  sin  of  its  sinful  quality. 

It  is  worth  pointing  out,  therefore,  that  there  is  a 
fallacy  here  also,  a  fallacy  which  can  be  read  plainly 
enough  in  the  facts  of  our  own  experience.  For  Bo¬ 
hemia  finds  itself,  after  all,  no  universal  brotherhood, 
but  a  region  distinctly  localized  in  our  minds :  we  know 
by  instinct  the  pla^e  for  this  abstract  gaiety  of  forget¬ 
fulness  and  irresponsibility.  It  is  in  the  world  of  art, 


CURRENT  FALLACIES  REGARDING  SIN  133 

of  letters,  of  fairly  distant  history, — in  brief,  it  is  in 
the  world  of  imagination  (for  remote  history  takes  on 
imaginative  quality)  that  Falstaff,  Aspasia,  The  Jolly 
Friars,  Lucretia  Borgia,  Tam  O’Shanter,  Don  Juan, 
and  all  the  other  heroes  and  heroines  of  the  morally 
unstrenuous  life  have  their  rightful  sphere.  They  are 
the  glorified  fringes  of  our  too  sharp-cut  and  self-right¬ 
eous  ideals.  Their  human  value  lies  in  the  respiration 
they  afford  to  repressed  possibilities  within  us,  their 
conspiracy  with  our  own  genius  and  invention,  not  in 
the  actual  frailty  or  vice  which  they  embody.  If  we  en¬ 
joy  them  with  a  bad  conscience,  it  is  because  we  cannot 
accept  them  in  this  role;  we  fear  that  this  function  of 
imaginative  release  will  be  mistaken  (by  others?) ;  we 
fear  the  subconscious  inference  from  the  proposition, 
To  err  is  human  (which  is  true),  to  the  proposition, 
Error  is  not  error  (which  is  false).  This  is  the  essence 
of  the  fallacy. 

But  there  is  a  third  fallacy  which  lends  support  to 
the  others,  and  is,  perhaps,  their  more  philosophical 
expression.  It  may  be  stated  thus :  Whatever  is  natural 
is  right;  Whatever  is  impulsive  is  natural;  hence, 
Whatever  is  impulsive  is  right.  The  common  misdeeds 
of  humanity,  springing  as  they  do  from  impulse,  are  to 
be  dealt  with  not  as  moral  wrongs,  but  as  effects  of 
natural  causes :  if  the  effects  are  unwelcome,  they  are 
to  be  changed  by  changing  the  causes.  As  nobody  can 
do  anything  that  cannot  with  equal  reason  be  referred 
to  nature,  this  reasoning  would  at  a  stroke  abolish  the 


134 


CONSCIENCE 


category  of  sin.  If  this  category  is  to  hold  its  own, 
we  must  be  able  to  state  what  sin  means,  in  terms  of 
human  instincts. 


>/•  - 


-  \ 


CHAPTER  XVII 


INSTINCT  AND  SIN 

THE  early  manifestations  of  instinct  are  crude 
enough;  but  crudity  and  sin  are  not  identical. 
Many  of  the  early  assertions  of  natural  impulse  in  chil¬ 
dren  are  inconvenient  to  ourselves;  but  they  are  not 
on  this  account  anti-social.  Some  innate  dispositions 
we  may  justly  call  dangerous ;  hut  this  does  not  make 
them  wrong.  There  is  nothing  in  original  human  nature 
which  taken  by  itself  can  be  called  evil. 

This  principle  may  be  understood  to  mean  that  any 
instinct  is  justified  by  virtue  of  its  existence.  Stanley 
Hall  and  others,  on  this  ground,  are  willing  to  recog¬ 
nize  such  tendencies  as  lying,  stealing,  cruelty,  greed, 
and  malice  as  right  in  their  place.  In'  the  main  they  hold 
it  advisable  that  these  impulses  should  come  to  their 
natural  expression,  wearing  themselves  through  on  a 
principle  resembling  the  Aristotelian  katharsis,  and 
paving  the  way  for  the  more  congenial  impulses  that 
normally  follow  them.  One  is  reminded  of  the  Sabba- 
sava  Sutta,  in  which  it  is  held  that  some  of  the  asavas, 
or  native  weaknesses  of  character,  should  be  overcome 
by  due  indulgence.  In  view  of  these  same  tendencies, 
however,  Professor  E.  L.  Thorndike  feels  bound  to 
hold  that  ‘  ‘  original  nature  is  very  often  and  very  much 


136 


CONSCIENCE 


imperfect  and  wrong.”1  And  had  we  the  same  view 
of  human  nature  as  that  adopted  by  these  observers, 
we  should  be  driven  to  Thorndike’s  conclusion  rather 
than  to  that  of  Stanley  Hall.  But  we  cannot  agree  that 
these  particular  impulses  are  natural,  however  char¬ 
acteristic  they  may  be  of  childhood.  It  begs  the  entire 
question  to  ascribe  to  human  nature  impulses  to  cheat, 
to  steal,  to  bully,  to  torture,  etc. :  the  names  chosen 
carry  with  them  the  ethical  reproach.  An  impulse,  taken 
by  itself,  is  a  promise  of  satisfaction,  and  so  far,  of 
good.  We  have  a  natural  impulse  to  climb;  and  if  we 
climb  trees  we  may  find  other  natural  impulses  to  take 
what  is  growing  there.  But  this  taking  is  not  in  itself 
‘ stealing’:  it  becomes  stealing  only  in  relation  to  a 
social  environment  not  involved  in  the  first  intention 
of  the  act.  There  is  no  natural  impulse  to  steal. 

The  same  is  true  of  supposed  tendencies  to  deceive. 
Children  have  dramatic  impulses  which  may  acquire 
the  character  of  deception  by  the  entrance  from  with¬ 
out  of  a  demand  for  facts.  The  moral  quality  lies  not 
in  the  impulse  but  in  its  relation  to  this  demand.  So 
hunger  may  acquire  the  character  of  selfishness  and 
greed,  by  the  arrival  of  other  claimants.  It  is  not  so 
obvious  in  the  case  of  primitive  fighting  and  sex  im¬ 
pulses,  in  which  other  human  beings  are  normally  con¬ 
cerned,  that  the  moral  qualification  can  be  denied ;  and 
doubtless  it  is  these  impulses  that  have  had  to  bear 
the  brunt  of  the  traditional  condemnation  of  human 

1  The  Original  Nature  of  Man,  p.  280.  He  thinks  the  view  that 
original  nature  is  essentially  wrong  and  untrustworthy  to  be  “probably 
as  fair”  as  the  view  that  original  nature  is  always  right. 


INSTINCT  AND  SIN 


137 


nature.  Yet  here,  too,  we  have  to  take  the  ground  of 
the  primitive  impulses  themselves.  And  primitive  anger 
and  love,  if  they  make  any  excursion  into  the  minds 
of  their  objects,  picture  these  objects  to  themselves 
as  pure  enemy  or  pure  lover,  and  in  this  light  there 
is  nothing  in  them  to  condemn.2 

Crude  impulses  must  be  described  by  non-invidious 
names.  Further,  we  may  notice  that  the  apparent  moral 
defect  lies  not  in  the  impulse  itself,  hut  in  the  manner 
in  which  it  reaches  satisfaction.  With  an  impulse  are 
organized  (to  compose  the  instinct)  certain  methods 
of  procedure,  not  inseparably  nor  exclusively,  but  as 
the  directest  ways  to  the  goal — the  4 ‘ natural  ways,”  we 
may  call  them.  Thus,  it  is  more  natural,  at  least  for 
Anglo-Saxon  boys,  to  fight  with  fists  and  according  to 
the  principle  “ all’s  fair,”  than  to  fight  with  swords 
or  arguments  and  according  to  rule  and  order.  The 
ways  which  represent  much  social  modification  and 
technique  are  called  “better”:  the  natural  way  is  less 
adapted  to  the  latest  marches  of  society.  If  we  have  an 
instinct  to  hunt  and  kill,  it  certainly  knows  nothing  of 
hook  or  gun:  something  much  more  like  Tolstoy ’s 

2  A  wise  critic  puts  to  me  this  question:  “Are  not  these  forms  of 
the  will  to  power?  Will  not  the  self  in  its  early  stage,  after  finding 
that  he  can  subject  the  inanimate  world  to  himself,  attempt  also  to 
assert  his  will  on  the  living,  as,  e.g.,  in  deception,  stealth,  pugnacity, 
cruelty?  Is  there  not  a  natural  antagonism,  and  does  not  morality 
rightly  arise  through  incipient  immorality?  ’  ’  My  answer  would  be  that 
self-assertion  is  indeed  a  form  of  the  will  to  power,  and  when  tried 
upon  fellow  beings  is  frequently  incipient  immorality.  But  if  it  becomes, 
let  us  say,  actual  ‘cruelty,’  it  is  because  it  goes  beyond  pure  self- 
assertion  and  begins  to  be  aware  of  a  conscious  and  suffering  environ¬ 
ment. 


138 


CONSCIENCE 


picture  of  the  boar  hunt,  or  Fielding’s  picture  of  the 
Malayan  sacrifice  comes  to  mind.  In  so  far  as  the 
natural  ways  are  unfitted  to  contemporary  social  needs 
or  sensitivities,  or  to  their  own  conscious  environment, 
they  are  objectively  evil.  But  it  is  only  as  such  unfit¬ 
ness  enters  the  mental  horizon  of  the  agent  that  a  moral 
evil  can  be  alleged.3 

Admitting,  then,  that  no  crude  impulse  is  sinful  taken 
by  itself,  it  does  not  in  the  least  follow  that  crude  im¬ 
pulses  as  we  find  them  in  human  nature  are  therefore 
good.  It  does  not  so  much  as  follow  (as  is  often  stated) 
that  they  are  devoid  of  moral  quality.  For  as  we  find 
them  in  human  nature,  no  impulse  is  by  itself.  The 
moral  quality  of  any  impulse  is  due  somehow  to  its 
mental  environment,  not  to  its  own  intrinsic  quality  ; 
hut  every  impulse  (after  the  hypothetical  firsjt)  has  an 
environment.4  It  is  particularly  true,  of  the  instincts  of 

3  I  do  not  say  that  the  perception  of  such  unfitness  is  sufficient  to 
constitute  a  moral  quality;  I  say  only  that  it  is  ngc^ssary.  To  give  an 
act  a  moral  character,  it  is  further  necessary  that  the  person  having 
the  impulse  should  recognize  an  obligation  to  achieve  what  is  fit  rather 
than  what  is  unfit,  should  perceive  himself  as  qualified  by  his  own  act, — 
subject,  that  is,  to  approval  or  reproach, — and  should  know,  too,  that 
he  is  able  to  refrain  from  following  his  impulse  in  view  of  his  obliga¬ 
tion.  These  elements  may  all  be  present,  of  course,  without  any  power 
of  analysis  on  the  part  of  the  moral  subject. 

4  This  fact  seems  to  be  overlooked  in  Dewey ’s  penetrating  discussion 
of  the  concept  of  motive.  “A  child  grabs  food  .  .  .  greediness  simply 
means  the  quality  of  his  act  as  socially  observed  and  disapproved.  By 
attributing  it  to  him  as  his  motive  ...  we  induce  him  to  refrain’ ’ 
(Human  Nature  and  Conduct,  p.  120).  The  child’s  eating,  we  agree,  is 
not  ‘greedy’  as  a  satisfaction  of  hunger,  but  as  over-muscular  and  under- 
circumspect:  the  standards  of  poise  and  consideration  lie  outside  the 
instinct.  But  not  outside  the  individual.  We  should  have  no  right  to  tell 


INSTINCT  AND  SIN 


139 


pugnacity  and  sex-love,  about  whose  natural  rightness 
much  is  said  and  with  weighty  conclusions,  that  the  en¬ 
vironment  into  which  their  full  strength  emerges  is 
elaborate  and  compact.  It  is,  therefore,  thoroughly 
fallacious  to  argue  that  because  these  impulses  taken 
by  themselves  are  justified  by  their  existence,  these 
same  impulses  taken  together  with  the  rest  of  a  human 
mind  are  equally  justified  in  their  original  crudity. 
Nothing  can  be  condemned  because  it  is  crude;  but  a 
moral  question  may  arise  at  once  if  an  impulse  has  an 
opportunity  to  he  something  else  than  crude.  Sin  lies, 
we  judge,  in  the  relation  of  an  impulse  to  its  mental 
environment.  AVliat  In  particular  is  this  relation? 

In  our  analysis  of  human  nature,  we  recognized  two 
strata,  that  of  the  central  instincts,  and  that  of  the 
more  specific  instincts  and  units  of  behavior.  These 
central  instincts,  we  thought,  no  matter  how  various 
their  names,  were  in  reality  forms  of  a  single  tendency, 
which  we  roughly  described  as  the  will  to  power.  As 
for  the  other,  more  specific  instincts,  it  appeared  to 
us  that  while  each  one  had  its  own  particular  goal  and 
its  way  thereto,  none  could  be  wholly  independent  of 
this  central  current  of  the  will.  Because  every  impulse 
of  a  given  mind  belongs  to  that  mind,  it  must  at  least 

him  he  was  greedy  unless  in  fact  he  were  so  by  his  own  judgment.  The 
motive  is  not  something  imputed  by  us:  we  merely  supply  a  name  for  a 
struggling  element  of  his  own  self-consciousness.  We  use  a  normal  au¬ 
thority  in  supplying  the  name  and  suggesting  an  attitude  in  advance  of 
moral  clarity  on  the  part  of  the  culprit.  We  abuse  authority  when  we 
try  to  impose  our  motive-names  and  attitudes  on  an  innocent  conscious¬ 
ness.  There  is  a  place  for  command  and  obedience,  prior  to  the  age  of 
possible  appreciation;  but  moral  qualification  is  another  matter.  Motives 
cannot  be  superimposed. 


140 


CONSCIENCE 


appear  consistent  with  its  central  purpose ;  more  than 
this,  it  must  more  or  less  fully  satisfy  that  central 
purpose  within  its  special  field.  It  is  here  that  the  moral 
issue  arises.  For  any  given  impulse  may  reject  the  re¬ 
sponsibility  to  carry  any  further  meaning  than  that 
of  its  own  direct  goal.  I  may  say,  Hunger  is  hunger,  it 
means  bread,  and  nothing  more  fanciful;  or  Fear  is 
fear  and  its  whole  significance  is  that  I  make  good  my 
immediate  escape,  without  responsibility  to  any  other 
instincts,  social  or  what  not;  or  Desire  is  desire,  and 
if  any  vague  sense  of  my  total  destiny  attempts  to  im¬ 
pose^  further  interpretation,  so  much  the  worse  for 
the  vague  sense  and  its  pretended  claims.  The  moral 
issue  arises  from  this  conflict :  not  the  conflict  between 
one  person  and  another,  nor  the  conflict  ^between  one 
impulse  and  another  in  a  given  mind ;  but  the  conflict 
between  a  given  impulse  and  the  central  will,  o*r  be¬ 
tween  the  separate  and  restricted  meaning  of  an  im¬ 
pulse,  and  the  wider  meaning  which  because  of  its 
human  belonging  it  “ought”  to  carry.  Sin,  I  believe, 
is  the  refusal  to  interpret  xrud^  impulse  in  terms  of 
the  individuattiTmost  intelligent  will  to  power. 

The  responsibility  of  the  particular  impulse  to  the 
central  will  is,  in  fact,  twofold.  It  has  not  simply  to 
be  subordinate  to  the  central  will  and  express  it;  it 
has  also  to  aid  in  creating,  or  giving  substance  to,  that 
central  will.  For,  as  we  saw,  the  self  acquires  vigor 
and  definiteness  of  policy  only  by  degrees ;  all  instinc¬ 
tive  experience  must  be  laid  under  contribution  to 
give  solidity  and  consistency  to  the  central  trend.  The 
mind  is  at  first  a  very  feeble  and  general  unity,  aim- 


INSTINCT  AND  SIN 


141 


ing  to  become  more  concrete.  Its  numerous  impulses 
and  hungers,  as  nature  wakes  them,  establish  for  it  a 
lax  routine,  but  no  coherent  purpose.  Ask  a  young 
child  what  its  plans  are  for  the  day,  the  week,  the 
future;  sufficient  unto  the  hour,  for  the  child,  is  the 
pain  or  pleasure  thereof.  Indeed,  a  unified  policy  is 
never  completely  achieved;  there  is  always  a  certain 
desultoriness  or  unrelatedness  in  our  many  doings — 
life  is  “first  one  thing  and  then  another”:  each  of  us 
knows  only  more  or  less  what  in  the  concrete  he  most 
deeply  wants.  But  just  because  of  this  more  or  less, 
and  because  in  administering  our  impulses  we  can  con¬ 
trol  the  more  or  less,  human  existence  takes  on  moral 
character.  Sii^,  we  may  «ay,  is  the  deliberate  failure  to 
interpret  an  impulse  so  that  it  will  confirm  or  increase 
the  integration  of  selfhood. 

Consider,  for  example,  an  impulse  of  anger.  There 
is  another  will  which  opposes  my  own;  and  the  “nat¬ 
ural  way”  of  my  impulse  is  to  break  down  this  oppo¬ 
sition  by  main  force,  destroying  the  opposing  will  if 
necessary.  The  will-to  power  might  seem  to  be  in  full 
possession;  and  to  some  extent  iVis  in  possession — but 
not,  for  the  human  intellect,  in  full  possession.  For 
power  is  lost,  generally  speaking,  when  an  opposing 
mind  is  treated  according  to  the  “natural  way”  as  a 
physical  obstacle,  or  “thing.”  If  that  opposing  mind 
survives  as  a  mind,  it  exists  (as  a  physical  obstacle 
does  not)  as  a  force  against  the  hostile  self,  and  so  far 
as  a  subtraction  from  its  power.  If  it  does  not  survive 
as  a  mind,  there  is  so  much  less  for  the  will  to  power 
to  rule  over :  this  will,  in  human  form,  has  robbed  itself 


142 


CONSCIENCE 


of  its  normal  domain.  If,  then,  I  allow  my  impulse  to 
assume  its  primitive  and  separate  meaning  of  destruc¬ 
tion,  I  give  it  an  interpretation  inconsistent,  in  general, 
with  as  much  of  my  will  to  power  as  I  am  capable  of 
grasping.  I  sin.  And  I  am  aware  of  the  fact,  however 
vaguely: — this  is  my  conscience. 


CHAPTER  XVIII 


SIN  AS  BLINDNESS  AND  UNTRUTH 

IN  a  sinful  act,  we  were  saying,  one  is  aware  of  his 
own  deficiency  of  interpretation.  If  he  were  not  thus 
aware,  his  act,  though  objectively  wrong,  would  not  be 
sinful.  Yet  this  awareness  is  kept  obscure  by  the  strat¬ 
egy  of  the  sinful  consciousness  itself :  for  purposes  of 
protective  coloration,  it  endeavors  to  suppress  the  un¬ 
welcome  knowledge. 

In  any  full-fledged  passion,  as  of  wrath,  we  can  read¬ 
ily  detect  this  trait  of  wilful  blindness  It  is  character¬ 
istic  of  passion  to  exclude  a  part  of  the  mental  horizon. 
There  is  immense  satisfaction  in  radical  thought  and 
radical  action:  by  eliminating  scruples  or  further  con¬ 
siderations,  our  mental  state  gains  at  once  that  sim¬ 
plicity  and  unity  in  which  we  have  a  “  necessary  inter¬ 
est,  ’  ’  for  they  insure  that  added  intensity  in  the  process 
of  living  which  is  the  object  of  the  life  elan  itself.  The 
impeding  call  for  the  additional  meaning  is  at  a  disad¬ 
vantage,  because  it  appears  as  hostile  to  more  abundant 
life;  yet  as  it  is  the  achieved  will  to  power  that  is 
attempting  to  assert  itself,  it  cannot  be  banished:  it 
can  only  be  thrown  into  the  margin.1  Sin,  in  fact,  deals 

1  One  recommendation  of  this  account  of  moral  consciousness  over 
that  of  McDougall,  for  example,  may  be  that  the  problem  how  the 
naturally  weaker  motive  acquires  such  strength  as  often  to  overcome  the 
naturally  stronger  motive  loses  much  of  its  point.  There  is  no  need  to 


144 


CONSCIENCE 


in  margins.  It  involves,  as  has  often  been  pointed  ont, 
an  obscuration  of  knowledge ;  but  wbat  it  rejects  is  only 
the  difference  between  one  thought  system  and  another 
slightly  more  complete.  Passion  is  always  highly  in¬ 
tellectual  and  alert.  The  most  primitive  exhibition  of 
pugnacity  is  full  of  such  concepts  as — “On  this  issue 
(simple  or  complex) — you  (with  your  view  of  it) — shall 
submit — shall  regret — your  obstinacy — shall  go  down 
— before  this,  my  attack — longer  parley  intolerable, 
stultifying — all  evasion  shall  be  swept  away.”  It  is 
simply  that  the  marriage  between  the  given  course  of 
behavior  and  its  appropriate  thought-system  is  so  close 
that  a  readjustment  in  favor  of  a  more  complete, 
and  probably  less  definite,  thought-system  is  rendered 
difficult. 

We  see  that  sin  cannot  be  defined,  except  very  rela¬ 
tively,  as  a  preference  of  pleasure  to  reason :  there  are 
pleasure  and  reason  on  each  side.  There  is  on  each 
side  a  satisfaction  of  the  will  4o  live — we  have  seen 
that  passion  presents  itself  as  a  more  abundant  life 
than  its  opposite;  and  on  each  side  a  satisfaction  of 
the  will  to  power,  which  all  human  actions  must  in 
some  degree  express.  There  is,  in  fact,  no  descriptive 
difference  between  the  act  which  is  sinful  and  the  act 
which  is  not  sinful :  sin  has  all  the  psychological  ingre¬ 
dients  of  virtue,  and  virtue  all  the  ingredients  of  sin — 
even  to  the  mental  concentration,  the  limiting  of  mar¬ 
ginal  thought.  It  is  only  the  wholly  individual  situa- 

appeal  to  the  growing  strength  of  a  self-regarding  sentiment.  For  the 
central  will  has  as  much  of  the  strength  of  all  the  instincts  as  at  any 
time  the  self  has  succeeded  in  lending  it  by  its  efforts  of  interpretation. 


SIIST  AS  BLINDNESS  AND  UNTRUTH  145 

tion,  the  reference  of  a  given  impulse  to  an  available 
charge  of  interpretative  thought,  that  furnishes  the 
criterion. 

An  assertion  of  the  individual  character  of  sin  usu¬ 
ally  excites  the  question  how  it  is  then  that  social  or¬ 
ganization,  with  its  common  laws  and  statutes,  describ¬ 
ing  murder,  theft,  adultery,  disorderly  conduct  by 
definite  and  chiefly  external  means,  is  possible, — a  ques¬ 
tion  which  we  have  later  to  consider, — but  the  principle 
of  the  answer  seems  to  be  this :  There  are  certain  kinds 
of  objective  behavior  which  are  so  far  below  the  level 
of  average  human  interpretative  power  that  we  can 
assume  with  all  but  complete  certainty  that  the  objec¬ 
tive  wrong  implies  a  subjective  wrong.  And  for  social 
purposes  we  must  assume  this,  allowing  under  liberal 
regimes  that  strong  evidence  might  still  convince  us  of 
the  contrary.  It  is,  in  fact,  far  safer  to  assume  that  an 
externally  anti-social  behavior  is  internally  sinful  than 
that  an  externally  correct  behavior  is  internally  vir¬ 
tuous.  But  neither  assumption  is  entirely  safe ;  and  in 
our  own  discussion  we  are  speaking  of  principles,  not 
of  proportions.  In  all  strictness,  no  behavior  can  be 
defined  as  sinful  by  its  descriptive  characters  alone. 

But  we  can  perhaps  find  a  still  more  complete  ex¬ 
pression  of  the  nature  of  sin  by  considering  a  further 
development  of  the  “meaning”  which  an  act  may 
carry. 

Every  day  a  great  volume  of  money  changes  hands 
without  a  word,  the  meaning  of  the  transaction  being 
established  by  some  understanding  in  the  background. 


146 


CONSCIENCE 


The  understanding  may  be  an  agreement  for  work  and 
wages;  then  if,  at  the  week’s  end,  A  pays  money  to  B, 
the  acts  of  A  in  giving  and  of  B  in  receiving  bear  a 
definite  meaning  which  could  be  expressed  in  the  form 
of  an  assertion.  B’s  act  of  receiving  means,  “I  have 
done  the  work  agreed  upon,  and  am  entitled  to  this 
return”;  A’s  act  means,  “I  believe  that  you  have  done 
your  work,  and  this  is  your  earning.”  If  B  has  not 
done  his  work,  his  act  still  conveys  the  same  meaning ; 
hut  this  time,  it  is  a  false  meaning.  His  act  is  equiva¬ 
lent  to  an  untruth.  The  wrong  does  not  lie  primarily 
in  the  untruth;  hut  the  untruth  points  out  the  wrong. 

Suppose  now  that  we  have  arrived  at  an  understand¬ 
ing  about  the  conditions  which  justify  a  decision  in 
general,  namely,  that  I  shall  only  then  decide  and  act 
when  I  have  fairly  interpreted  my  impulses.  In  this 
case,  any  decision  or  act  of  mine  would  have  this  fur¬ 
ther  meaning:  that  I  have  done  my  interpreting,  and 
am  justified  in  releasing  the  act,  in  saying  “Now”  to 
my  impulse.  And  as  my  actions  aim  at  some  satisfac¬ 
tion,  whether  in  the  acting  or  in  the  end  reached,  it 
follows  that  my  pleasures  themselves  acquire  a  mean¬ 
ing ,  because  of  the  general  understanding.  Pleasure, 
to  the  moral  self,  ceases  to  be  mere  pleasure :  it  means 
a  justified  mastery ;  it  means  that  so  far  as  I  know  my 
own  will,  it  is  now  being  realized;  it  means  that  the 
material  of  experience  is  becoming  subject  to  my  ideas 
and  purposes.  If  I  have  accepted  this  understanding, 
and  take  a  pleasure  without  complying  with  the  condi¬ 
tions,  without  doing  my  thinking  and  interpreting,  then 
that  taking  of  pleasure  means  a  falsehood.  I  sit  down 


SIN  AS  BLINDNESS  AND  UNTRUTH 


147 


to  meat,  and  my  eating  does  no  more  than  satisfy  my 
appetite,  when  by  the  grace  of  God  I  profess  that  it 
concerns  my  widest  plans  and  purposes  also :  in  this 
case  my  eating  becomes  a  lie  in  action.  Always  assum¬ 
ing  the  understanding,  we  can  agree  so  far  with  Wol¬ 
laston — a  keen  but  little-noticed  thinker — that  all  sin 
has  the  character  of  untruth,  because  of  the  unspoken 
assertions  or  meanings  of  our  acts.  Wollaston  had  in 
mind  the  meanings  which  acts  carry  by  virtue  of  social 
understandings  and  conventions.  Thus  if  I  beat  my 
wife,  or  betray  my  friend,  I  treat  them  as  if  they  were 
not  wife,  or  friend:  my  acts  convey  untruth.  For  us, 
however,  the  untruth  lies  farther  back  than  the  social 
usage  in  treating  wives  or  friends:  it  is  found  in  the 
general  recognition  by  human  consciousness  that  hu¬ 
man  acts,  at  any  rate,  must  express  a  well-considered 
will  to  power.  From  such  a  will,  certain  ways  of  treat¬ 
ing  wives  and  friends  will  follow  by  logical  necessity. 

Sin,  with  this  understanding,  appears  as  a  reckless 
Now-saying,  to  the  pleasure  of  action  or  enjoyment;2 

2  The  thesis  that  pleasure  has  a  meaning  is  likely  to  meet  a  cold 
reception  from  those  whose  scientific  conscience  requires  them  to  assert 
in  all  cases  that  a  primrose  is  a  primrose — and  nothing  more.  Let  me 
say  that  I  do  not  deny  that  pleasure  is  pleasure.  What  I  deny  is  that 
pleasure  to  a  human  being  is  ever  quite  11  nothing  but  pleasure.  ” 

What  else,  then,  is  it,  as  a  matter  of  plain  psychology?  Psychologi¬ 
cally,  pleasure  will  be  admitted  an  absorbing  experience:  it  tends  to 
concentrate  the  attention  within  its  own  focus.  But  what,  pray,  does 
it  absorb?  If  it  is  my  pleasure,  it  absorbs  me;  if  yours,  it  absorbs 
you:  it  absorbs  the  self  that  experiences  it.  But  what  is  the  self  when 
absorbed  in  the  pleasure  except  that  pleasure  simply?  The  self  is  the 
pleasure,  if  you  like;  but  here  the  plain  psychologist  is  in  danger  of 
losing  all  the  significant  truth  about  pleasure:  it  would  be  better  to 
state  the  identity  conversely — the  pleasure  is  the  self.  For  the  pleasure 


148 


CONSCIENCE 


and  hence  as  a  false  assertion  that  in  that  pleasure  I 
am  a  complete  man.  I  accept  my  wages;  I  have  not 
paid  the  price  in  labor,  or  in  thought. 

is  not  a  fixed  entity  to  whose  measure  the  self  shrinks;  it  is  the  self 
which  is  a  relatively  fixed  entity  to  whose  measure  the  pleasure  tends 
to  expand.  Child  and  man  may  find  pleasure  in  the  same  object;  but 
the  pleasures  are  as  the  child  is  to  the  man. 

What  does  the  self  bring  to  the  pleasure?  Its  meaning.  The  simplest 
meaning  of  pleasure  is  that  it  is  what  life  is  for.  It  satisfies  the  self; 
it  becomes  a  guide.  So  much  meaning  biology  is  inclined  to  assert. 
But  has  it  any  further  meaning? 

Experience  develops  further  meanings.  Pleasure  is  at  first  something 
discovered;  it  is  not  demanded,  it  is  hit  upon.  It  is  an  enlightening 
discovery;  it  seems  to  unlock  the  secret  of  life,  and  hence  becomes,  as 
we  said,  a  guide.  But  what  is  at  first  a  privilege  becomes  looked  upon, 
just  because  it  seems  to  belong  to  life,  as  a  right.  Pleasure  begins  to 
mean  something  due,  and  claimed,  and  perhaps  rightfully  fought  for. 
The  will  to  power  takes  the  form  that  Hobbes  so  perfectly  describes; 
it  tries  to  “ensure  forever  the  way  of  my  future  desire. ”  Any  particu¬ 
lar  pleasure  takes  on  the  meaning  of  an  element  in  a  total  life-require¬ 
ment. 

For  human  beings,  experience  passes  through  this  stage,  but  does  not 
stop  there,  as  Hobbes  thought.  It  is  found  that  pleasure,  as  a  private 
right,  fails  to  satisfy.  With  prey  in  mouth  the  cat  at  once  becomes  a 
solitary  beast;  and  with  every  pleasurable  absorption  men  also  tend 
to  loosen  their  ties  with  other  men.  Since  pleasure  satisfies  my  will,  it 
tends  to  make  me  complete  in  myself;  every  joy  has  a  centrifugal  com¬ 
ponent,  it  tends  to  be  a  “joy  apart  from  thee. ”  Yet  just  this  compo¬ 
nent  makes  the  meaning  of  pleasure  so  far  attained  incomplete.  To  a 
human  being  pleasure  seeks  to  take  on  the  meaning,  not  of  a  private 
victory,  but  of  a  victory  in  which  my  social  world  shares,  either  actually 
or  by  consent.  Eating  ceases  to  mean  scurrying  into  the  thicket  with 
the  snatched  morsel;  it  begins  to  mean  an  opportunity  for  celebrating  a 
common  life. 

There  is  perhaps  no  limit  to  the  meaning  that  a  simple  pleasure  may 
bear ;  but  even  to  plain  psychology  it  cannot  be  called  ‘  ‘  mere  pleasure.  ’ 1 

Thus,  if  one  reflects  upon  the  phylogenesis  of  our  capacities  for 
pleasure,  he  may  light  upon  the  view  that  every  enjoyment  in  the  human 
being  represents  a  long  history  of  self-denials  on  the  part  of  our  sub¬ 
human  ancestors.  Pleasure  would  acquire  a  further  meaning  for  such 
a  view;  it  would  mean  an  inheritance  of  prehistoric  labor  and  sacrifice. 


SIN  AS  BLINDNESS  AND  UNTBUTH 


149 


We  cannot  forthwith  define  sin,  however,  as  a  pre¬ 
mature  Now-saying  to  action  or  enjoyment;  it  is  sim¬ 
ply  an  unjustified  Now-saying,  and  it  may  also,  though 
more  rarely,  be  too  late.  In  a  difficult  decision  delay 
may  itself  become  a  momentary  satisfaction:  under 
the  pretence  of  further  thought,  a  lesser  volume  of 
thinking  may  be  accepted — too  little  to  win  the  right 
of  decision.  Thus  sin  may  more  completely  assume 
the  appearance  of  virtue,  and  obliterate  the  descriptive 
differences.  Yet  in  this  guise  also,  it  corresponds  to 
our  analysis:  it  is  the  refusal  to  interpret;  it  is  like¬ 
wise  the  false  assertion,  whether  by  action  or  by  delay, 
that  my  action  expresses  my  attainable  interpretation. 

And  because  of  this  meaning,  illicit  pleasure  would  mean,  as  for  Mr. 
G.  K.  Chesterton,  the  exploitation  of  a  deposit,  the  violation  of  a  trust, 
disloyalty  to  an  implied  compact  with  all  the  elemental  virtue  that  has 
gone  into  our  human  make. 

Or,  if  the  horizon  in  which  our  will  has  to  work  out  its  destiny  is 
enlarged  by  thought,  until  it  tries  to  conceive  the  world  as  whole;  and 
if  that  whole-view  perceives  a  quality  in  the  world  which  might  be 
called  divine;  then  pleasure  will  appear  as  a  symbol  of  this  divine 
quality,  possibly  as  a  participation  therein.  If  pleasure  is  used  in  such 
wise  as  to  blur  or  banish  the  holiness,  or  dignity,  or  beauty,  or  infinitude 
of  the  conscious  horizon,  it  is  false  to  that  meaning.  From  this  side,  sin 
is  secularization. 


CHAPTER  XIX 


WHY  MEN  SIN 

IT  is  possible  to  analyze  sin,  and  in  a  measure  to 
describe  it.  It  is  not  possible  to  explain  it.  For  to 
explain  it  would  be  to  show  it  as  the  necessary  or  in¬ 
variable  consequence  of  certain  conditions ;  and  what¬ 
ever  is  necessary  or  automatic  is  not  sin.  Sin  implies 
that  kind  of  freedom  in  which  the  fate  and  character 
of  each  conscious  act  comes  for  a  moment  under  the  con¬ 
trol  of  ‘self*;  and  neither  nature  nor  environment  nor 
God  decides  what  meaning  the  act  shall  bear. 

It  is  true  that  right-doing  lies  in  the  direction  of 
effort ;  and  that  wrong-doing,  as  the  easier  course,  has 
the  advantage  of  the  natural  slope.  Sin  is  likely  to 
pose  as  the  “law  of  the  members”  and  to  claim  the  in¬ 
dulgence  due  to  the  natively  stronger  motive.  The  bur¬ 
den  of  explanation  would  thus  be  thrown  upon  doing 
right:  we  should  rather  ask  how  it  is  possible  not  to 
sin.  But  we  have  deprived  ourselves  of  this  recourse, 
since  the  will,  as  the  central  thread  of  our  meaning,  is 
on  the  side  of  the  fully  interpreted,  or  right,  action.1 
Doing  right,  however,  requires  “trying”;  and  if  we 
were  thoroughly  necessitated  beings,  we  might  explain 

i  In  a  self  there  is  no  ‘  1  stronger  motive  ’  ’  except  that  which  the  self 
makes  stronger.  After  we  have  acted  it  requires  no  great  wisdom  to  tell 
which  consideration  was  the  prevailing  one.  But  the  wisdom  which  can 
tell  this  'beforehand  is  still  to  be  found. 


WHY  MEN  SIN 


151 


the  variable  vigor  of  our  trying  by  the  varying  amount 
of  the  energy  at  our  disposal,  and  the  fluctuations  of 
that  hunger  and  thirst  after  righteousness  with  which 
we  are  endowed.  But  unfortunately  for  this  type  of 
explanation,  no  experience  is  more  familiar  than  that 
of  trying  more  or  less  hard,  within  the  limits  of  the 
energy  and  interest  we  have.  The  moral  issue  lies 
wholly  within  the  range  of  what  trying  we  are  able 
to  do. 

But  in  these  respects,  moral  mistakes  seem  to  hear 
a  close  analogy  to  the  mistakes  which  are  inevitable 
in  acquiring  any  new  art,  and  may  have  the  same  ex¬ 
planation.  The  beginner  at  target  practice  will  miss 
the  mark :  that  is  a  safe  prediction.  He  is  entirely  free 
to  hit  it:  and  there  is  no  assignable  reason  why  he 
must  miss  it.  “Good  shooting,’ ’  said  a  marksman  to  me, 
“is  simply  a  matter  of  caring  enough  about  each  shot.” 
Yet  the  beginner  will  miss.  As  time  goes  on,  he  will 
miss  less  frequently,— a  curve  of  his  progress  in  learn¬ 
ing  can  be  drawn.  Some  men  progress  more  rapidly 
than  others,  and  go  farther  toward  a  perfect  score ;  but 
there  is  a  similarity  in  all  curves  of  learning.  Is  not 
sin  a  missing  of  the  target,  and  hence  a  phenomenon 
of  the  curve  of  learning  ? 

For  any  particular  technique  at  which  we  try,  the 
curve  of  learning  holds ;  and  so  with  the  virtues,  so  far 
as  they  have  a  technique.  Franklin’s  scheme  of  monthly 
practice  was  a  prudent  one.  But  right  is  not  a  matter 
of  matching  an  objectively  definable  standard.  In  all 
such  efforts  the  full  will  of  the  individual  is  on  the 
side  of  striking  the  mark,  and  the  adjustment  is  de- 


152 


CONSCIENCE 


feated  by  the  physical  obstacles  of  imperfect  organiza¬ 
tion  and  control.  In  the  moral  effort  there  is  no  diffi¬ 
culty  of  this  sort:  the  nature  of  right  is  to  be  always 
within  reach,  otherwise  there  is  no  obligation.  The 
point  is  that  my  full  will  is  not  on  the  side  of  striking 
that  mark.  Hence  the  analogy  breaks  down ;  and  there 
is  no  law  of  learning  for  morality.  The  sinful  situation 
is  not  a  failure  to  reach  what  was  by  some  organic  law 
beyond  reach;  it  is  a  defection  from  what  was  within 
my  power.  I  have,  as  a  fact  of  history,  preferred  an 
easier  course. 

Thus  sin  is  in  all  cases  a  matter  of  history,  or  better, 
of  biography.  Our  judgment  that  all  men  sin  is  statis¬ 
tical  in  part,  taking  into  account  the  immense  number 
of  decisions  that  men  make ;  and  in  part  it  is  due  to  a 
knowledge  of  the  conditions  that  favor  imperfect 
choices.  It  is  on  this  ground  alone  that  we  can  approach 
an  account  of  why  men  sin.  In  most  general  terms,  sin 
is  possible  because  of  the  existence  of  real  moral  di¬ 
lemmas  (and  later  of  feigned  dilemmas) ;  and  every  sin 
has  a  ‘case,’  either  of  innocuousness  or  of  positive 
virtue.  When  once  we  have  begun  to  take  part  in  the 
world  of  action,  the  world  sees  to  it  that  we  are  driven 
from  one  venture  to  another:  the  exigencies  of  growth 
compel  us  to  face,  from  time  to  time,  a  new  step  with 
all  its  possibilities  of  error,  while  the  alternative  of 
playing  safe  in  the  old  way  is  itself  an  error.  It  might 
be  possible  to  show  the  entire  history  of  sin  as  a  history 
of  moral  growth.  I  shall  content  myself  with  mention¬ 
ing  a  few  typical  situations. 


WHY  MEN'  SIN 


153- 

1.  There  is  one  dilemma  that  attends  every  moral 
act;  though  it  is  seldom  that  it  becomes  acute.  It  con¬ 
cerns  the  process  of  coming  to  a  decision.  There  is  an 
obvious  danger  of  false  judgment  in  acting  before  de¬ 
liberation  is  complete;  but  there  is  likewise  a  danger 
of  error  in  holding  decision  until  deliberation  can  be 
complete. 

For  deliberation  never  reaches  anything  but  a  rough 
completion.  Through  experience  every  man  finds  for 
himself  a  degree  of  certainty  which  he  regards  as 
sufficient  for  practical  purposes:  he  calls  himself  4 cer¬ 
tain  ’  when  this  standard  is  reached,  and  for  the  most 
part  his  deliberative  process  rises  quickly  to  this  level 
and  passes  into  action  without  hesitation.  For  he  has 
found  that  if  he  acts  at  all,  he  must  act  when  his  action 
will  fit  the  case ;  he  must  reach  the  best  possible  view 
of  the  case  in  the  time  permitted.  He  is  but  occasion¬ 
ally  aware  of  what  is  universally  true :  that  no  case  has 
ever  been  seen  by  him  in  its  full  meaning.  AM  since 
all  of  our  fiats  are  issued  in  partial  obscurity,  the 
chance  is  offered,  as  they  fall  through  the  dark  of  the 
mind,  for  deflection  toward  the  lurking  magnets  of 
the  cruder  wishes.  Thus  there  is  wrong  in  delaying 
beyond  the  moment  of  an  action’s  possible  meaning; 
and  yet  the  imperfect  reflection  involved  is  the  natu¬ 
ral  cover  of  sin. 

2.  No  man  can  live  a  moral  life  in  aloofness  from 
society  and  its  various  alliances ;  yet  all  alliance  is  alli¬ 
ance  with  the  imperfect.  It  might  be  hard  to  say  which 
is  in  the  greater  danger  of  political  error,  the  party 


154 


CONSCIENCE 


man  or  the  non-party  man.  Each  has  his  own  peril; 
and  a  cynic  would  have  it,  we  suspect,  both.  It  is  evi¬ 
dent,  however,  that  growth  lies  in  the  direction  of  be¬ 
longing.  It  is  at  the  cost  of  losing  all  effect  that  one 
refrains  from  attachment  to  whatever  is  historical  and 
organized  in  the  world.  Institutions  exist  to  lend  to 
each  individual  member  their  over-individual  dimen¬ 
sions  and  scope.  It  is  not  alone  a  practical  hut  a  moral 
peril  if  I  reject  their  aid. 

It  is  equally  evident  that  there  are  no  perfect  institu¬ 
tions.  Whatever  is  historical  inherits  the  strength  and 
the  weakness  of  all  the  past  from  which  it  comes ;  and 
whatever  is  organized  must  make  use  of  concrete  men 
whose  virtues  are  mixed  with  their  vices.  Is  it  possible 
to  be  an  historical  entity  without  partaking  of  the  evil 
with  which  one  must  make  alliance!  It  is  not  politics 
alone  that  involves  this  threat  of  contamination  and 
compromise:  nothing  historical  is  free  from  it,  the 
church,  the  professional  group,  social  traditions,  so¬ 
cieties  everywhere, — even  friendship,  if  Emerson’s 
dictum  is  right,  “Friends  descend  to  meet.”  It  is 
possible  to  be  in  the  world  and  not  of  it;  but  is  it 
possible  to  work  with  it  and  not  be  of  it! 

I  do  not  say  that  it  is  impossible:  I  say  that  there 
is  a  moral  difficulty  in  either  alternative.  I  must  ally 
myself ;  but  I  must  vigilantly  interpret  that  alliance, 
as  Burke  interpreted  the  social  contract,  as  an  alliance 
with  all  the  honest  strivings  of  my  comrades,  to  the 
rejection  of  the  ease  and  profit  of  all  guilty  conformity. 
In  all  positive  living,  the  morally  necessary  ends  are 
perpetually  pleading  the  justification  of  the  means, 


WHY  MEN  SIN 


155 


and  who  can  avoid  being  carried  from  time  to  time 
across  the  evanescent  line?  Sin  has  no  need  to  enter 
life  as  a  separate  deed: — it  may  he  the  simple  pro¬ 
longing  of  a  good  deed. 

3.  The  moral  life  must  become  social,  we  have  said : 
growth  lies  that  way.  Among  the  necessary  incidents 
of  this  socially  moral  existence  is  the  use  of  moral 
authorities,  which  we  have  already  referred  to  as  a 
natural  habit  of  conscience.  Perfect  rectitude  implies 
an  art  of  preserving  solitude  of  decision  amid  the  mass 
of  suggestion  borne  in  upon  us  from  our  environment : 
the  distinction  between  the  good  and  the  evil  of  the 
alliances  we  were  speaking  of  requires  and  assumes 
this  power.  But  we  cannot  escape  the  need  of  moral 
authority  any  more  than  we  can  escape  the  time- 
element  in  decision.  And  the  dilemma  lies  not  so  much 
in  the  likelihood  that  we  will  choose  radically  wrong 
authorities  (for  humanity  has  shown  a  singular  una¬ 
nimity  in  its  major  selections,  its  heroes  and  saints) 
as  that  we  will  take  our  authorities  whole. 

It  is  doubtful  whether  any  leader  is  not  liable  at 
some  point  to  become  a  misleader.  At  such  a  point 
clear  judgment  for  the  follower  becomes  peculiarly 
difficult,  since  it  involves  a  plunge  out  of  congenial 
company  into  solitude.  Moral  disillusionment  is  the 
severest  of  experiences.  The  habit  of  deference  takes 
on  the  psychological  quality  of  a  secondary  virtue: 
when  the  rift  appears  in  the  halo,  it  becomes  necessary 
to  choose  either  the  distress  of  opposing  an  honored 
guidance,  or  that  tacit  complicity  which  is  the  parent 


156 


CONSCIENCE 


of  cynicism,  and  whose  creed  is,  “All  men,  even  the 
best,  are  at  heart  false.  ” 

Such  an  experience  is  severe  only  because  there  was 
an  initial  error  in  the  degree  of  reliance  placed  upon 
the  authority  in  question.  The  will  had  been  seduced 
into  ease  by  the  presence  of  an  object  of  too  great 
trust:  sin  was  already  there.  For  this  reason,  it  is 
natural  to  plead  for  the  alternative  of  rejecting 
authority  altogether  in  moral  matters,  an  alternative 
in  which  I  do  not  hesitate  to  say  there  is  an  equal 
danger  of  moral  faltering,  ineptitude,  and  obliquity, 
even  to  the  limited  extent  to  which  the  discarding  of 
moral  guidance  is  possible. 

4.  If  moral  disagreement  is  one  of  the  incidents  of 
moral  growth;  and  if  it  is  the  business  of  men  to  in¬ 
corporate  their  convictions  in  action, — as  it  is;  there 
is  no  escape  from  the  occasional  dilemma  between  fight¬ 
ing  for  your  conviction  and  letting  your  conviction  fail 
by  avoiding  hostilities. 

What  I  conceive  as  right  I  am  bound  to  work  for, 
and  if  need  be  fight  for.  The  distinction  between 
working  and  fighting  is  gradual:  in  either  case  I  am 
opposing  myself  to  what  opposes  my  purpose.  The 
difference  lies  in  the  amount  of  faith  I  have  in  my 
opponent,  and  in  the  time  and  effort  I  can  subtract 
from  my  work  to  accomplish  his  conversion.  There 
comes  a  time  at  which  I  must  decide  that  he  that  is 
not  for  me  is  against  me:  to  defer  this  decision  is  as 
evil  as  to  hasten  it.  Yet  wherever  opposition  enters, 
there  is  so  great  a  likelihood  of  the  entrance  of  moral 


WHY  MEN  SIN  157 

wrong,  that  we  are  often  counselled  rather  to  forgo  the 
good  it  aims  at. 

For  when  one  fights  for  human  rights,  is  he  not  also 
fighting  for  his  own!  And  when  one  fights  for  his  own 
rights,  is  he  not  also  fighting  for  his  comforts!  Since 
public  wrong,  as  a  rule,  first  shows  itself  in  economic 
injury,  he  who  fights  for  liberty  and  justice  has  to 
reflect  that  his  fight  intends  also  to  be  profitable.  His 
opponent  will  seldom  fail  to  remind  him  of  this  fact, 
and  to  interpret  his  psychology  accordingly.  And  when 
motives  are  mixed,  the  warrior  can  hardly  be  too  con¬ 
fident  about  the  color  of  his  own  purpose.  The  justest 
warfare,  in  its  beginnings,  is  open  to  suspicion. 

And  further,  however  perfectly  the  belligerent  spirit 
is  at  first  in  accord  with  the  necessities  of  honor,  its 
momentum  tends  to  carry  it  beyond  the  point  of  the 
moral  issue.  The  activity  of  fighting  has  its  own  in¬ 
stinctive  delight;  and  while  the  belligerent  exaltation 
is  probably  intended  by  nature  to  make  easier  the 
transition  from  comparative  sloth  to  full  activity  under 
a  vital  demand,  it  is  at  least  as  difficult  for  this  passion 
as  for  others  to  hold  itself  within  the  bounds  of  this 
function,  as  means  to  an  ulterior  end.  And  morally,  it  is 
more  necessary  that  it  should  accept  this  meaning. 

Perhaps  it  is  superfluous  to  point  out  the  moral  peril 
of  warfare ;  yet  it  may  serve  a  purpose  in  measuring 
the  moral  peril  of  the  alternative.  The  dangers  of 
hostility  are  obvious;  but  those  of  peace  are  incom¬ 
parably  deceitful. 

It  was  Thomas  Hobbes  who  adopted  the  maxim 
“Seek  peace  and  pursue  it”  as  the  first  law  not  of 


158 


CONSCIENCE 


love  but  of  enlightened  selfishness.  As  the  wrongs 
which  I  have  not  combatted  and  might  have  combatted 
are  indefinitely  more  numerous  than  the  selfish  interests 
for  which  I  have  fought,  it  appears  to  me  that  incom¬ 
parably  the  greater  bulk  of  moral  error  is  that  which 
enters  the  will  under  the  garb  of  peace.  Fighting  is 
hard  and  distracting  work:  peace,  I  say,  has  easier 
victories.  But  what  if  this  more  ideal  warfare  does 
not  take  place?  Here  is  my  community,  for  example,  in 
which  I  do  not  have  to  look  far  for  examples  of  in¬ 
justice,  waste,  maladministration,  which  are  bound  to 
affect  the  health,  happiness,  or  safety  of  myself,  my 
children,  and  many  others :  yet  I  do  not  take  issue  with 
them.  There  are  philosophers  in  Europe  who  have  been 
preaching  for  some  time  the  gospel  of  the  right  of 
might,  or  of  the  strong  culture  which  judges  itself  the 
best.  I  have  known  of  this  too,  and  have  not  lifted  a 
voice  against  it.  Had  those  who  knew  of  it  risen  in  time, 
and  had  they  faced  the  ills  of  which  this  doctrine  was 
but  a  symptom,  the  world  might  well  have  been  spared 
its  last  and  greatest  war.  The  test  of  an  evil  peace  is 
that  its  fruit  is  discord  and  not  unity ;  and  conversely, 
any  peace  that  eventuates  in  war  is  thereby  shown  to 
have  been  an  evil  peace. 

The  moral  seductiveness  of  peace  lies  in  its  method 
of  dealing  with  wrong:  it  is  apt  to  deal  with  it  as  an 
unclean  person  deals  with  dirt, — by  preferring  not  to 
recognize  its  existence,  hence  leaving  it  unmet  and 
uncured.  The  clean  soul  is  militantly  eager  to  find  the 
dirt:  the  true  lover  of  peace  with  a  similar  obsession 
seeks  for  the  spot  that  is  unharmonized,  and  makes 


WHY  MEN  SIN 


159 


an  issue  of  that  spot  nntil  it  is  wiped  out.  He  smells 
afar  off  the  issues  that  threaten  war,  ferrets  them  out 
in  advance,  and  tries  to  settle  them.  But  the  greater 
part  of  onr  vociferous  cult  of  peace  has  become  foul, 
stagnant,  attempting  to  conceal  in  dark  closets  the 
underlying  differences  of  interest  and  the  unresolved 
dislikes  of  the  world.  Its  policy  is  the  policy  of  Hush. 
It  is  the  cover  of  our  deepest  and  largest  guilt. 

5.  To  generalize  from  situations  such  as  the  above, 
the  only  right  ways  of  behavior  are  ways  which  with 
a  slight  change  of  inner  adjustment  become  wrong 
ways.  Conversely,  to  venture  a  wrong  way  is  a  condi¬ 
tion  of  finding  the  right  way.  This  much  the  search 
after  righteousness  has  in  common  with  the  acquisition 
of  skill.  We  begin,  indeed,  with  something  better  than 
random  movements ;  but  we  do  not  begin  with  a  self- 
consciousness  quick  to  discern  the  point  at  which  the 
imperfect  maxim  usurps  the  nest  of  the  perfect  one. 
There  is  nothing  to  be  achieved  in  the  moral  life  except 
at  a  risk  which  is  a  moral  risk.  He  who  will  not  risk 
falling  into  egotism  or  undue  self-assertion  can  hardly 
win  an  honorable  effectiveness;  for  the  crude  plunge 
of  action,  if  it  has  the  merit  of  vigor  and  decision,  will 
rarely  escape  at  first  the  touch  of  insensitiveness.  And 
he  who  will  not  risk  a  fall  into  cowardice  or  ease  will 
hardly  find  the  point  of  an  honorably  pacific  will.  I  do 
not  say  that  we  must  fall :  I  say  that  we  must  risk  the 
fall.  We  must  find  our  moral  equipoise  through  trial 
and  the  risk  of  error. 

But  behind  the  vagaries  of  such  moral  self-educa- 


160 


CONSCIENCE 


tion,  there  lies  the  good-will  to  win  this  equipoise, 
which  is  the  redeeming  feature  behind  many  an  actual 
sin.  It  is  the  total  will,  not  the  partial  will,  which  gives 
the  ultimate  character  to  an  act;  and  so  a  career  of 
moral  adventure,  if  it  is  a  genuine  search  for  truth  and 
not  a  covert  lust  for  the  joys  of  the  taster,  may  be  by 
conscience  itself  required  of  the  soul.  Or  let  me  rather 
say,  it  is  by  conscience  required  of  every  soul ;  though 
it  also  is  attended  by  the  subtlest  moral  peril.  For 
morality  that  is  not  original  is  no  morality. 

It  is  with  this  proviso  of  a  genuine  and  ultimate  will 
to  win  moral  truth  that  we  look  if  not  with  leniency 
yet  with  hope  upon  those  statistically  certain  lapses 
which  make  of  every  individual  a  participant  in  the 
sins  of  his  race.  For  given  this  good-will,  the  forces 
making  for  righteousness  are  twofold:  the  intrinsic 
attraction  of  the  good,  and  the  repulsion  of  the  evil. 
Sin,  when  it  occurs,  enhances  the  force  of  evil,  by  chan¬ 
nelling  deeper  the  path  already  easier  by  nature;  but 
it  also  enhances  the  force  of  good,  by  awakening  the 
reaction  we  call  remorse.  It  is  a  part  of  our  moral 
destiny,  as  a  race,  that  we  must  work  out  our  moral 
life  by  the  aid  of  both  forces,  the  quest  of  blessedness 
and  the  sorrowful  ruing  of  our  own  guilt.  In  so  far  as 
sin  is  capable  of  explanation  in  terms  of  a  balance  of 
forces,  the  explanation  is  this :  that  since  we  must  win 
moral  life  through  moral  adventure,  we  need  to  add 
the  push  of  rue  to  the  pull  of  the  ultimate  good,  in  order 

'  V  ~ 

to  find  our  adequate  and  complete  moral  motive. 


CHAPTER  XX 


SIN  AS  STATUS 

THERE  was  an  ancient  theological  conception 
which  attained  a  large  social  importance,  and 
even  a  political  importance  in  the  days  when  a  wide¬ 
spread  fear  of  future  punishment  was  a  factor  in 
allegiance  to  institutions.  This  conception  can  be 
couched  in  terms  of  a  rude  syllogism,  somewhat  as 
follows : 

The  wages  of  sin  is  death; 

All  men  are  born  in  sin ;  ergo, 

All  men  are,  by  birth,  mortal. 

7 

I  doubt  whether  this  argument  has  been  refuted:  in 
many  minds  it  has  suffered  a  severer  fate, — that  of 
being  outgrown  by  the  gradual  wearing  out  of  the 
belief  in  its  premises.  Upon  the  view  of  sin  which  we 
have  so  far  developed  there  can  be  no  such  thing  as 
“original  sin”:  every  man  is  his  own  Adam.  As  for 
death,  whether  physical  death  or  the  cessation  of  per¬ 
sonal  existence,  we  have  ceased  to  see  any  causal  con¬ 
nection  between  this  and  moral  delinquency.  Sin  of 
course  has  its  consequences,  both  social  and  psycho¬ 
logical  ;  the  attention  of  ethical  theory  has  been  largely 
occupied  with  these,  as  is  natural  in  a  pragmatic  era 
of  thought.  But  the  fact  that  these  ascertainable  con¬ 
sequences  exist  hardly  disposes  of  the  question  whether 


162 


CONSCIENCE 


there  are  also  metaphysical  consequences.  The  idea  of 
a  moral  causality  which  runs  deeper  than  the  surface 
of  phenomenal  connections  is  both  ancient  and  modern, 
a  property  of  all  great  religions  and  of  various  phil¬ 
osophies.  As  a  metaphysical  notion  it  lies  just  beyond 
the  range  of  our  present  enquiry.  But  it  is  human 
nature,  and  particularly  moral  human  nature,  to  make 
conscious  connections  with  ultimate  facts;  for  this 
reason,  we  cannot  fairly  finish  our  own  task  without 
stepping  over  this  border. 

We  may  remind  ourselves  at  this  point  that  we  have 
been  speaking  of  sin  in  but  one  of  its  two  traditional 
meanings.  Sin  has  commonly  referred  to  individual 
deeds, — and  so  we  have  understood  it ;  but  it  has  also 
referred  to  a  status.  As  a  status,  or  condition,  it  has 
implied  impurity,  pollution,  liability  to  banishment, 
etc.,  metaphysical  outlawry.  The  word  sinner  refers 
to  this  status  rather  than  to  the  particular  deeds.  Re¬ 
garding  it  in  this  way  we  should  have  to  say  that  so 
far  from  rejecting  the  notion  that  there  is  a  sinful 
status,  we  should  have  to  affirm  one,  so  far,  at  least, 
as  psychology  can  carry  us. 

My  moral  status,  as  a  fact  of  psychology,  would  be 
the  condition  of  my  preferences — my  character.  And 
my  preferences  I  cannot  modify  in  any  so  immediate 
way  as  I  can  modify  a  deed.  Suppose  that,  whether 
by  birth  or  by  acquired  habit,  I  simply  do  not  as  a  fact 
prefer  righteousness, — at  the  price  of  moral  effort. 
I  might  not  call  this  condition  depravity.  I  should  cer¬ 
tainly  not  call  it  holiness. 

And  this,  on  the  whole,  seems  to  be  the  condition  I 


SIN  AS  STATUS 


163 


am  in.  The  necessary  interest  I  have  in  blessedness 
is  relatively  faint;  it  appears  to  me  rather  as  some¬ 
thing  known  about,  or  heard  about,  than  of  poignant, 
present,  and  compelling  value.  And  while  some  shim¬ 
mer  of  the  beatific  vision  may  lend  a  distant  glow  to 
the  pursuit  of  duty,  the  actual  work  of  righteousness 
has  to  deal  rather  with  the  raw  materials  of  which 
happiness  is  made  than  with  happiness  itself.  It  is  like 
a  price  paid  in  advance,  sometimes  far  in  advance: 
there  is  a  strain  upon  faith,  upon  imagination.  One 
“ walks  out  upon  his  idea’ ’ — not  upon  his  immediate 
appreciation.  Such  is  the  balance  of  my  nature;  it  is 
this  balance  which  makes  it  historically  necessary  that 
ruing  should  add  itself  to  the  lifting  force  of  the  good. 
And  for  aught  I  can  see,  this  balance  came  with  me  into 
the  world,  as  a  part  of  my  inherited  being.  From  the 
first  I  willed  the  good  with  an  effort ;  and  so,  perhaps, 
as  Augustine  argues,  what  I  willed  was  never  quite 
good.  I  do  not  say  I  should  be  condemned  or  punished 
for  this ;  I  am  now  speaking  of  statuses,  i.e.,  of  simple 
metaphysical  facts. 

We  need  not,  however,  attribute  this  judgment  to 
Augustine  alone.  If  Aristotle  is  right,  we  are  all  of  us 
more  or  less  in  the  position  of  patients  who  cling  to 
their  illnesses,  of  those,  familiar  to  psychiatry,  who 
resist  being  robbed  of  their  delusions,  even  of  their 
persecutions.  It  takes  the  good  wholly  to  prefer  the 
good.  The  holy  will,  no  doubt,  is  something  to  be  ac¬ 
quired;  it  is  not  innate.  If  this  is  what  is  meant  by 
being  born  in  sin,  I  do  not  know  how  I  should  deny  it. 

I  doubt  whether  this  apparently  somber  judgment  of 


164 


CONSCIENCE 


original  human  nature  is  primarily  a  product  of  theo¬ 
logical  speculation.  It  has  at  least  a  strong  support 
in  common  experience.  For  quite  apart  from  all  theo¬ 
ries,  self-condemnation,  when  it  comes,  has  an  ex¬ 
traordinary  way  of  applying  retroactively :  blame 
frequently  reaches  back  over  a  past  which  seemed  inno¬ 
cent  of  the  moral  question  involved.  A  new  insight 
tends  to  condemn  all  prior  ignorance,  not  alone  re¬ 
gretting,  but  accusing,  the  long  persistence  in  the  lower 
level  of  life.  The  lover  enters  his  new  vista  of  con¬ 
sciousness  with  an  embarrassment  which  is  partly 
moral, — the  symptom  of  a  critical  self -judgment  which 
surveys  the  whole  domain  of  past  choices.  He  accuses 
that  past  self  at  least  of  a  moral  inertness ;  it  was  dull, 
as  atheists  are  dull  “who  cannot  guess  God’s  presence 
out  of  sight. 9  9 

The  argument  of  this  retroactive  judgment  may  be 
this.  That  my  life  has  been,  if  not  an  active  rejection 
of  the  good,  yet  a  long  acquiescence  in  something  less 
than  good.  I  have  failed  to  shake  myself  awake  to  the 
conditions  of  my  own  welfare.  I  have  accepted  without 
protest  enjoyments  I  have  not  earned:  I  have  not  en¬ 
quired  into  the  right  of  my  own  ease.  Back  of  all  my 
passivity  was  an  awareness  that  life  has,  after  all,  its 
conditions ;  and  I  failed  to  force  myself  up  to  the  exer¬ 
tion  or  hardship  of  learning  them.  There  was  a  pos¬ 
sible  subconscious  integrity  in  me  which  I  was  dis¬ 
loyal  to,  all  the  while  there  was  no  one  to  hold  me  to 
it.  I  have  not  known  in  detail  what  I  ought  to  do,  and 
I  cannot  be  judged  for  what  I  have  not  known,  but  I 
judge  myself  for  living  in  an  ignorance  which  my  will 


SIN  AS  STATUS  165 

knew  could  be  overcome.  I  was  not  without  that  clue, 
nor  that  desire.1 


Apart  from  particular  deeds  of  sin,  then,  our  com¬ 
mon  moral  consciousness  recognizes  something  like  a 
sinful  status.  As  for  those  deeds  themselves,  it  is  a 
matter  of  daily  experience  that  they  bring  a  new  status 
with  them.  Debasement  is  not  an  act;  it  is  a  condition 
of  choice  resulting  from  a  series  of  acts.  Each  aban¬ 
donment  of  the  effort  for  complete  interpretation, 
makes  the  next  abandonment  easier;  and  what  con¬ 
science  is  concerned  about  is  not  alone  the  issue  of 
this  act  but  also,  and  primarily,  the  psychological 
status  which  it  creates.  But  what  is  the  significance  of 
this  status,  whether  original  or  acquired!  Allowing 
that  we  are  justified  in  viewing  it  with  regret,  if  not 
wholly  with  indignation,  is  there  any  excuse  for  the 

i  In  greater  detail :  There  have  been  occasions  in  which  I  could  not 
be  reconciled  with  my  brother,  through  lack  of  available  sympathy  at 
that  moment.  But  I  know  that  that  sympathy  would  have  been  avail¬ 
able,  had  I  apart  from  times  of  stress  been  perceptive  of  facts  which 
it  was  my  business  to  know,  if  I  had  been  duly  out-living,  objective, 
alive.  Or,  I  cannot  think  of  the  right  thing  to  say  at  a  given  moment; 
and  who  can  blame  me  for  not  thinking  of  the  right  thing?  Yet  I  may 
well  blame  myself.  For  this,  too,  while  a  result  of  present  perception, 
is  of  a  perception  built  on  past  alertness.  Now  I  must  prepare  what  I 
would  say,  if  I  am  to  appear  well.  But  if  I  were  what  I  would  present 
myself  as  being,  consistently  and  always,  I  need  “take  no  thought  for 
what  I  shall  speak”;  myself  would  speak.  What  I  am  not  accuses  me. 
Even  what  I  am  not  in  intellect  traces  back  to  lapses  from  what  I  have 
been  admonished  to  become.  Admonished  by  what?  By  nothing  except 
by  the  perception  that  “life  lies  this  way,  rather  than  that,  and  for 
the  most  part,  in  living  in  the  object.”  Admonished,  if  you  like,  by 
the  original  synderesis,  adequate  to  its  own  work. 


166 


CONSCIENCE 


terror  and  guilt  of  soul,  the  “ anxiety  neurosis”  of  the 
older  theology  ? 

We  shall  see  more  clearly  if  we  eliminate  the  psycho¬ 
logical  element  of  blame,  and  ask  again  simply  for  fact. 
What  does  this  status  entail?  I  do  not  know.  But  I  am 
not  prepared  to  say  that  it  entails  nothing.  If  I  were 
told  that  it  entails  a  form  of  mortality,  I  should  lend 
the  assertion  a  respectful  hearing.  It  would  seem 
reasonable  to  me  that  a  lesser  status,  in  things  relat¬ 
ing  to  insight,  idea,  appreciation,  should  he  a  measure 
of  lesser  validity  in  point  of  reality.  If  ideas  are  the 
most  real  things  in  the  universe,  this  would  most  cer¬ 
tainly  he  the  case.  If  life  is  to  be  measured  in  terms 
of  intercourse  with  minds  with  whom  I  am  fit  to  con¬ 
verse,  I  can  see  that  this  status  of  inferiority  is  one 
that  must  carry  with  it  a  lesser  degree  of  life. 

Putting  away  all  emphasis  on  moral  ideals,  let  me 
look  at  things  “naturally.”  It  seems  in  this  sense  nat¬ 
ural  to  me  that  men  should  be  sinful.  It  seems  also 
natural  to  me  that  they  should  be  mortal.  It  is  not 
mortality  that  looks  strange  to  me;  it  is  immortality. 
I  could  not  rebel  if  I  were  told,  without  prejudice,  that 
my  range  of  existence  would  be  as  the  range  of  my  own 
effective  wishes.  This,  I  should  say,  is  obvious  justice. 
Let  those  who  care  for  immortality  take  the  pains ;  let 
the  others  have  their  own  finite  reward.  Let  each  have 
the  degree  of  life  which  his  own  status — by  its  natural 
hold  on  reality — commands. 

This  would  leave  us  all  in  calm,  were  this  the  last 
word.  For  who  could  regard  that  a  “punishment” 
which  is  simply  failure  to  attain  an  end  that  one  does 


SIN  AS  STATUS 


167 


not  want?  Yon  thunder  at  me  that  unless  I  repent  of  my 
sin,  I  shall  perish.  I  reply,  I  am  content  to  perish— 
indeed,  I  had  never  aimed  at  anything  else :  I  have  not 
insisted  on  being  immortal. 

But  we  are  not  thus  left,  by  nature,  at  our  natural 
ease.  Having  become  self-conscious,  we  have  no  choice 
but  to  see  life  for  the  good  it  is,  and  to  be  restless  at 
the  thought  of  exclusion  from  that  good.  To  lose  life, 
to  lose  the  quality  of  life,  to  lose  the  possibility  of 
responding  to  what  we  believe  to  be  the  best,  and  hence 
the  possibility  of  being  with  the  best,  to  be  unable,  as 
Dostoievski’s  Father  Zossima  has  it, — to  be  unable  to 
love,  and  to  know  this  inability  and  this  loss:  this  is 
a  torment  to  man  as  it  is  not  to  the  other  creatures.  If 
man  must  recognize  in  himself  a  status  of  natural  fini- 
tude,  we  must  also  ascribe  to  him,  in  his  original  equip¬ 
ment,  an  impulse  which  repudiates  that  status  and  de¬ 
mands  a  being  at  the  level  of  his  appreciation.  If  man 
is  by  nature  evil,  that  evil  is  not  all  of  him:  he  is  also 
by  nature  ill-at-ease  with  his  imperfect  self,  fretted 
bv  an  ambition  to  become  what  he  is  not,  an  ambition 
which  makes  of  his  conscience  an  ally  and  a  tool.  This 
is  not  something  different  from  the  will  to  power ;  but 
it  is  the  deepest  expression  of  that  will.  It  is  the  will 
to  overcome  death. 

Religion  has  had  this  service  to  render:  it  has  co¬ 
operated  with  this  human  unwillingness  to  accept  mor¬ 
tality.  It  has  constantly  reminded  man  how  easily  he 
may  remain  mortal,  and  how  hardly  he  may  earn  im¬ 
mortality.  It  has  made  him  pray  with  a  touch  of  fear, 


168 


CONSCIENCE 


‘  ‘  Take  not  thy  holy  spirit  from  me.  ’ 9  There  are  those 
who  refer  to  this  state  of  mind  as  an  6  anxiety  neurosis 9 : 
it  may  become  such.  But  in  substance,  it  is  simply  the 
original  man  in  his  wholeness  facing  the  fact  of  his 
natural  status.  Others  have  called  it  the  ‘divine  spark 9 
which  somehow  disturbs  our  clod.  Names  matter  little ; 
but  the  disturbed  state  is  one  of  increased,  not  lessened, 
awareness  of  truth.  The  capacity  of  feeling  the  natural 
bent  of  desire  as  invested  with  the  omen  of  finitude  is 
what  constitutes  man  not  only  a  self  but  a  soul.  For 
the  soul  is  the  self  as  aware  of,  and  seeking  to  control, 
its  metaphysical  status.  It  is  original  man  in  his  full 
stature. 

This  completes  our  survey  of  original  human  nature. 
We  shall  now  turn  to  the  process  of  its  remaking. 


PART  IV 


EXPERIENCE 


CHAPTER  XXI 


THE  AGENCIES  OF  REMAKING 

IN  studying  original  human  nature,  we  have  already 
begun  the  study  of  the  remaking  of  human  nature. 
For  remaking  is  in  large  part  a  work  of  man  upon 
himself,  i.e.,  the  gradual  transformation  of  the  frag¬ 
mentary  and  particular  impulses  by  the  central  in¬ 
stinct,  the  will.  The  self-conscious  being  is  inevitably 
a  self-changing  being;  and  what  we  have  called  the 
moral  aspect  of  original  nature  is  simply  the  self-con¬ 
scious  will  taking  a  broad  cosmic  responsibility  for  the 
work  of  self-building,  making  itself  a  present  partner 
with  man’s  remoter  destiny. 

The  moral  consciousness  is  not  separable  from  any 
other  aspect  of  self-consciousness.  It  is  not  necessarily 
a  moral  sense  which  may  lead  one  to  such  reflections 
as  “I  am  awkward,  or  slow,  or  peculiar,  or  inefficient” ; 
yet  in  judgments  of  this  sort,  if  there  is  a  morale  be¬ 
hind  them,  remaking  processes  begin.  Wherever  the 
human  being  can  catch  a  glimpse  of  himself  as  a  whole, 
self -judgment  will  emerge,  and  the  central  instinct 
will  begin  to  impose  its  findings  upon  each  impulse 
severally. 

And  strictly  speaking,  nothing  can  transform  a  will 
but  itself.  It  is  easily  possible  to  force  a  man  to  behave 
this  way  or  that,  by  various  sorts  of  coercion ;  but  this 
is  not  to  effect  a  change  in  his  instincts,  and  unless  the 


172 


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instincts  are  reached  there  is  no  change  in  the  man.  To 
change  human  nature  is  to  change  what  it  wants ,  or 
wills,  and  nothing  can  naturalize  within  the  will  such 
a  change  but  the  will  itself.1 

But  the  inner  factors  do  no  work  except  in  conjunc¬ 
tion  with  outer  occasions  which  furnish  the  materials 
and  the  incentives  for  self-judgment.  And  this  co-opera¬ 
tion  of  inner  with  outer  factors  of  change  is  what  we 
mean  by  the  word  ‘  experience.  ’ 

It  is  customary  to  make  a  contrast  between  what  one 
learns  on  the  basis  of  his  own  experience  and  what  he 
learns  from  his  social  environment.  On  this  ground 
we  might  be  inclined  to  divide  the  agencies  of  remaking 

i  It  is  the  recognition  of  this  truth  which  distinguishes  modern 
education,  the  education  of  freedom  as  opposed  to  that  of  constraint: 
the  principle  has  been  generally  understood  from  the  times,  at  latest,  of 
Pestalozzi  and  Froebel. 

No  doubt,  external  pressure  long  enough  continued,  a  long  imprison¬ 
ment,  for  example,  will  be  followed  by  some  change  of  character.  You 
may  be  able  to  recognize  a  convict  as  easily  as  you  recognize  a  member 
of  the  more  liberal  professions.  But  if  so,  it  is  because  a  degree  of 
consent  has  domesticated  in  him  as  in  them,  the  presumably  freer  people, 
certain  of  the  repeated  details  and  attitudes  of  his  daily  program.  The 
point  is,  that  however  little  the  program  itself  may  be  one  of  his  choice, 
the  habits  are  his  habits, — his  ways  of  adapting  his  will  to  a  persistent 
situation.  And  such  habits  may,  of  course,  mean  little  change  in  the 
deeper  strata  of  character. 

As  a  rule,  it  is  true,  constraint  does  finally  invade  a  will  incapable 
of  permanent  rebellion.  It  reaches  it  through  this  middle  stage  of  habit; 
for  habits  of  any  kind,  though  imposed  by  necessity,  will  reveal  variations 
more  or  less  alluring,  and  the  more  alluring  may  become  accepted  by  the 
pliable  character  as  its  own  choice.  Thus  force  may  develop  into 
seduction,  for  better  or  for  worse:  and  no  educational  theory  can  safely 
neglect  the  fact  that  many  a  horse,  driven  unwillingly  to  water,  finds  that 
it  wants  to  drinTc.  We  have  no  right  to  conclude,  because  all  remaking 
must  be  founded  on  consent,  that  therefore,  in  all  education,  obtaining 
consent  is  preliminary. 


THE  AGENCIES  OF  REMAKING 


173 


into  two  groups  which  we  might  broadly  label,  expe¬ 
rience  and  training.  This  distinction  must  have  some 
justification.  Otherwise  there  would  be  no  meaning  in 
the  question  whether  social  pressure,  or  some  particu¬ 
lar  brand  of  social  pressure,  is  helpful  or  hurtful  to 
human  nature.  Such  a  question  implies  that  there  is  a 
normal  course  of  development  which  human  nature, 
left  to  itself,  its  own  data  and  reflection,  would  tend  to 
realize.  When,  for  example,  Mr.  Bertrand  Russell  says 
that  “  those  who  have  had  most  of  ‘education’  are  very 
often  atrophied  in  their  mental  and  spiritual  life  ’ ? — 
and  no  doubt  he  is  right — he  implies  that  this  mental 
and  spiritual  life  of  the  individual  mind  has  a  natural 
growth  and  destiny  of  its  own,  capable  in  some  way  of 
being  ascertained  and  used  as  a  standard  for  judging 
the  results  of  social  action.  We  might  then  be  expected 
to  show  what  experience  would  do  with  human  nature 
if  there  were  no  such  thing  as  social  pressure  and 
education. 

It  is  obvious,  however,  that  social  experience  is  an 
integral  part  of  individual  experience ;  since  individual 
experience  has  neither  its  complete  data  nor  its  work¬ 
ing  tools  apart  from  social  interaction.  The  various 
standards  of  self-judgment  gain  certainty  and  vigor 
only  in  the  give  and  take  of  the  group;  there  are  no 
more  impressive  arguments  for  changing  one’s  ways 
than  the  wholly  spontaneous  reactions  of  one’s  fellows ; 
and  the  private  self  hardly  knows  its  own  desires  apart 
from  the  experiences  that  come  through  play,  submis¬ 
sion,  dominance,  affection,  and  the  like.  Isolation, 
actual  or  theoretical,  would  give  us  as  distorted  a  view 


174 


EXPERIENCE 


of  the  work  of  experience  as  of  original  human  nature. 
There  is  thus  no  point  in  attempting  a  distinction  be¬ 
tween  the  effects  of  solitary  experience  and  the  effects 
of  companionship :  the  only  distinction  worth  drawing 
would  be  between  one’s  own  reflection  upon  his  entire 
experience,  social  and  solitary,  and  his  neighbor’s  re¬ 
flection,  especially  when  the  neighborly  views  are  en¬ 
forced  by  artificial  rewards  and  punishments. 

This  is  the  distinction  which  we  shall  undertake  to 
draw,  meaning  by  1  experience  ’  simply  that  inner  diges¬ 
tion  of  data  of  all  sorts  whereby  the  outcome  of  every 
essay  in  behavior  becomes  a  basis  for  modifying  the 
next  similar  essay,  and  excluding  the  influence  of  all 
deliberate  suggestion  and  training.  We  shall  first 
glance  at  the  task  which  experience  in  this  sense  has 
to  accomplish. 


CHAPTER  XXII 


THE  TASK  OF  EXPERIENCE 

THERE  is  more  reshaping  to  be  done  in  the  human 
being  than  in  any  other  creature.  This  is  partly 
because  in  him  the  instincts  appear  in  more  numerous 
fragments,  less  fixed  in  their  connections  and  hence  less 
promptly  serviceable,  as  the  human  infant  is  less  nearly 
ready  at  birth  for  locomotion  than  the  new-born  colt. 
But  it  is  also  partly  because  the  great  middle  group  of 
instincts  which  we  have  called  the  general  instincts  are 
J  more  general ,  so  that  there  is  more  work  to  be  done  to 
fit  them  to  specific  circumstances. 

No  creature  can  engage  in  food-getting-in-general : 
it  must  get  particular  items  of  food  in  particular  ways. 
Even  the  most  definite  units  of  behavior,  as  grasping, 
biting,  are  generalities  needing  adjustment  to  every 
individual  task.  All  instincts,  then,  and  especially 
human  instincts,  have  to  be  brought  to  earth  by  build¬ 
ing  a  bridge  from  the  universal  to  the  particular.  The 
human  being,  so  far  as  his  original  impulses  are  guid¬ 
ing  him,  is  in  the  position  of  an  agent  under  such  widely 
general  orders  that  he  is  allowed,  and  obliged,  to  use 
a  liberal  ‘  discretion. ’  It  is  in  this  gap  between  the 
broad  thrust  of  instinct  and  the  particular  emergency 
that  ‘  intelligence  ’  finds  its  first  employment. 

When  I  say  that  intelligence — i.e.,  the  idea  of  a  total 


176 


EXPEBIENCE 


end  regulating  the  ways  and  means  to  its  fulfilment — 
spans  this  gap,  I  do  not  mean  that  it  acts  unaided. 
Nature  does  not  fail  to  make  specific  suggestions  in 
specific  situations :  in  every  circumstance  there  must, 
of  course,  be  some  nervous  route  of  least  resistance. 
Nature  may  produce  a  veritable  magazine  of  handy 
responses,  which  may  be  run  through  more  or  less 
mechanically  until  some  one  suits  the  emergency,  as 
in  the  case  of  an  animal  seeking  to  escape  from  a  trap. 
But  the  significant  thing  is  that  Nature  herself  draws 
the  distinction  between  these  suggestions  and  the 
major  instinct:  they  are  alterable,  loosely  attached, 
while  the  general  instinct  remains  controlling  the 
alterations.  The  law  seems  to  hold  for  human  nature 
that  the  more  specific  the  suggestion,  the  more  alter¬ 
able  it  is. 

Take,  for  example,  the  instinct  to  fly  from  danger — 
a  general  instinct.  No  highly  developed  creature  is 
endowed  with  such  an  instinct  without  numerous 
auxiliary  responses.  When  a  special  sign  indicates  a 
special  danger — a  loud  noise,  a  6  i large  object  coming 
rapidly  toward  one” — nature  has  one  or  more  pro¬ 
posals  to  make,  also  comparatively  specific — to  shrink, 
to  retire,  to  get  closer  to  companions,  to  call  out,  to 
hide.  But  it  is  just  these  specials  signs  (stimuli)  and 
special  suggestions  (responses)  which  are  modifiable.1 

i  McDougall  holds  that  it  is  the  emotional  core  of  the  instinct  which 
persists,  while  the  two  termini,  the  afferent  and  efferent  channels,  are 
subject  to  modification.  But  what  persists  is  more  than  an  emotion; 
it  is  the  entire  general  tendency.  As  the  instincts  which  McDougall 
enumerates  are  themselves  highly  general,  I  should  not  hesitate  to  pro- 


THE  TASK  OF  EXPERIENCE 


177 


Thus,  birds  which  by  impulse  take  to  flight  at  any  loud 
noise  may  learn  to  sit  through  the  passage  of  a  rail¬ 
way  train ;  while  the  mere  sight  of  a  man  on  foot  will 
scatter  them.  The  former  special  stimulus  has  ceased 
to  have  the  general  meaning  ‘  danger ? ;  the  latter  special 
stimulus  has  acquired  that  general  meaning.  A  rabbit 
at  large  when  alarmed  will  make  for  its  burrow;  in 
captivity,  it  will  make  for  its  box  or  kennel.  The  gen¬ 
eral  meaning,  c escape,’  can  no  longer  take  the  former 
special  route — the  natural  way;  the  latter  response 
has  acquired  that  meaning.  In  such  modifications  of 
stimulus  or  response,  or  both,  consists  the  education 
or  self-education  of  the  animal:  they  are  the  work  of 
‘  intelligence,  ’  so  far  as  they  are  guided  by  the  persist¬ 
ing  idea  of  the  general  end,  that  is  to  say,  by  a  mind 
or  self ;  we  call  them,  also,  the  results  of  6  experience  ’ — 
understanding,  however,  that  apart  from  the  4  intelli¬ 
gence  ’  the  experience  would  mean  nothing,  and  there¬ 
fore  accomplish  nothing. 

What  is  accomplished  is  usually  something  more, 
however,  than  a  fitting  of  a  particular  response  to  a 
particular  situation,  as  the  examples  given  will  show. 
For  the  new  stimuli  and  responses  that  are  brought 
under  the  general  instinct  are  themselves  general.  The 
bird  has  an  attitude  toward  4 walking  men’  which, 
though  far  more  specific  than  its  attitude  toward 
‘ danger,’  is  still  a  general  attitude.  These  acquired 
generalities  we  call  habits.  A  habit  might  indeed  be 

pose  that  it  is  they ,  in  their  entirety,  which  persist,  while  the  modifica¬ 
tion  affects  mainly  such  particularized  channels  as  form  the  main  object 
of  Professor  Thorndike’s  studies. 


178 


EXPEKIENCE 


fairly  described  as  an  acquired  (and  usually  compara¬ 
tively  specific)  instinct.2  It  is  what  experience  deposits 
when  the  mind  has  played  long  enough  with  a  situa¬ 
tion  that  is  bound  to  recur;  has  played  long  enough, 
that  is,  with  its  repertoire  of  responses  and  its  own 
inventions,  to  adopt  a  general  method  as  best,  and  to 
turn  its  experience-interest  to  other  situations. 

Thus  ‘  experience  ’  moves  through  the  growth  of  our 
natural  impulses  like  a  reaper’s  swath, — concerned  at 
every  point  with  the  particular  instance,  while  having 
before  it  and  leaving  behind  it  only  the  masses  and 
bundles  of  grain,  generalities  of  higher  and  lower  level. 
The  result  of  this  reaping  of  experience  is  that  nothing 
is  left  standing  in  its  original  relation  to  Mother  Earth. 
Everything  is  now  brought  into  relation  to  the  pur¬ 
poses  of  the  reaper.  No  natural  impulse  can  become  a 
matter  of  experience  and  remain  unchanged.  What  we 
call  memory  implies  that  every  new  stimulus  will  be 
invested  with  all  the  meaning  of  what  followed  at  the 

2  As  a  connection  between  stimulus  and  response,  habit  has,  as 
Watson  justly  remarks,  the  same  structure  as  instinct.  It  is  not  impos¬ 
sible  that  instincts  may  have  originated  to  some  extent  through  such 
deposits.  But  it  is  an  error  to  hold  that  there  is  no  essential  difference 
between  them  (Watson,  Behavior,  p.  185).  Habit  differs  from  instinct 
in  its  relation  to  the  higher  centers.  Since  habit  is  not  flung  off,  so  to 
speak,  as  a  full-blown  bubble,  until  the  self  is  satisfied,  or, — let  me  say, — 
since  habit  is  never  even  relatively  finished,  until  attention  is  relatively 
turned  to  other  sequences,  a  habit  is  controlled  by  a  central  awareness 
of  the  meaning  of  its  sequence  as  an  instinct  is  not  controlled.  An 
instinct,  we  may  say,  turns  into  habit  just  in  proportion  as  it  yields  up 
to  consciousness  the  secret  of  its  destination.  So  far  as  action  is  in¬ 
stinctive,  consciousness  is  increasingly  aware  of  the  articulation  of 
parts  into  a  total  sequence;  so  far  as  it  is  habitual,  the  awareness  of 
elements  is  on  the  decline,  and  the  centers  are  dealing  with  the  complex 
whole  as  a  simple  entity,  whose  meaning  is  sufficiently  grasped. 


THE  TASK  OF  EXPERIENCE 


179 


previous  ventures.  Every  new  effort  is  normally  more 

my  own  than  any  previous  effort.  And  if  a  mind  is 

equipped  like  the  human  mind  with  vigorous  impulses 

of  curiosity  and  play,  the  most  favorable  result  of  any 

item  of  behavior  will  not  preserve  the  next  following 

cases  of  the  kind  from  experimental  variation,  though 

it  were  alwavs  for  the  worse. 

* 

But  we  must  now  look  more  particularly  at  the 
methods  by  which  experience  works  in  transforming 
instinct. 


CHAPTER  XXIII 


THE  METHODS  OF  EXPERIENCE 

WHEN  we  picture  to  ourselves  experience  as  an 
active  agency,  working  upon  a  passive  and 
malleable  mind,  we  think  of  it  as  wielding  the  tools  of 
pleasure  and  pain.  These  tools  are  universal  and  im¬ 
perative  :  no  man  can  ignore  them,  especially,  no  child. 
Of  the  two,  pain,  the  chief  change-working  tool,  is  the 
more  impressive  and  inescapable:  it  is  said  to  be  “pre¬ 
potent,”  that  is,  to  assume  when  it  appears  a  certain 
precedence  over  other  claims  to  attention.  And  there 
is  a  degree  of  justice  in  speaking  of  the  mind  as  passive. 
For  while  all  living  and  experimenting  must  be  active, 
and  I  may  launch  what  ventures  I  will,  I  cannot  decide 
in  advance  whether  the  outcome  shall  be  agreeable  or 
the  reverse.  Here  I  am  at  the  mercy  of  the  world,  and 
of  my  own  constitution.1 

The  general  method  of  experience  is  not  a  secret. 
Whatever  experiment  of  mine  results  in  pleasure  will 
be  confirmed,  and  its  occasion  will  be  sought  again. 
Whatever  experiment  results  in  pain  will  tend  to  be 
checked  or  much  modified  at  its  next  suggestion.  Pleas- 

i  To  experience  is  to  experiment  and  to  read  the  returns  of  experi¬ 
mentation.  Experimenting  is  an  active  element ;  also  mounting  the 
results.  But  if  experimenting  were  sufficient  to  determine  the  results 
themselves,  as  certain  forms  of  idealism  suggest,  experiment  would  lose 
its  meaning. 


THE  METHODS  OE  EXPERIENCE  181 

lire  heightens  the  rate  and  energy  of  experimenting, 
and  so  tends  to  increase  the  total  volume  of  experience. 
It  leads  the  will  out,  supplies  it  with  information  of 
what  there  is  to  live  for,  and  increases  the  likelihood 
that  new  types  of  pleasure  will  be  found.  Pleasure  is 
thus  a  type  of  experience  which  favors  its  own  growth, 
and  so  becomes  the  substance  with  which  ^  life ?  does,  or 
normally  should,  fill  up.  Of  pain,  in  general,  the  reverse 
is  true.  Probably  some  retrospective  alteration  of  the 
nervous  channel  is  being  effected  during  the  experience 
of  pain  itself,  tending  to  occlude  the  channel,  as  the 
physiological  side  of  that  experience. 

But  what  this  change  is  and  how  far  back  it  reaches 
cannot  he  put  down  in  any  simple  general  proposition. 
It  depends  in  the  first  place  upon  the  mind  that  expe¬ 
riences  the  pain.  The  burnt  animal,  generally  speak¬ 
ing,  dreads  the  fire,  and  avoids  it.  But  it  is  not  true 
that  the  burnt  moth  ceases  to  approach  the  flame,  nor 
either  that  the  traditional  burnt  child  refrains  from 
further  experiments.  The  phototropism  of  the  moth 
persists ;  the  interest  of  the  child  persists  likewise.  The 
child  has  connected  the  image  of  the  flame  with  the  ex¬ 
perience  of  being  burnt ;  the  moth  has  not.  But  beyond 
this  quasi-mechanical  linkage,  with  its  inhibiting  force, 
the  child  recognizes  in  its  own  approach  to  the  flame 
differences  of  degree,  of  rapidity,  of  route;  and  this 
recognition  is  a  controlling  factor  in  what  its  experi¬ 
ence  means  to  it.  In  an  animal  intermediate  between 
moth  and  man  the  effect  of  the  burning  might  be  a  blank 
and  absolute  negative  toward  all  flames.  For  the  human 
being  there  are  no  such  negatives : — there  are  acquired 


182 


EXPERIENCE 


cautions  and  discriminations.  Such  experience,  in  brief, 
drives  a  human  being  to  ‘ think.’ 

Such  thinking  is  still,  like  the  first  exercise  of  intel¬ 
ligence,  a  subsuming  of  means  under  ends ;  hut  here  it 
takes  the  direction  of  analyzing,  and  making  hypoth¬ 
eses, — i.e.,  of  induction.  In  the  result  it  will,  if  it  can, 
so  modify  its  plan  of  action  as  both  to  gain  the  good 
and  avoid  the  evil.  There  is  at  once  a  beginning  of 
science,  and  of  the  economic  virtues. 

But  the  nature  of  the  change  produced  by  experience 
depends,  in  the  second  place,  upon  the  hind  of  pain  (or 
pleasure) — for  different  kinds  of  disagreeable  expe¬ 
rience  give  different  kinds  of  thrust  to  the  mind.  While 
it  is  true  that  every  outcome  of  an  experiment  must  be 
either  favorable  or  unfavorable,  and  that  we  may  call 
all  favorable  results  pleasurable  and  all  unfavorable 
results  painful,  the  names  pleasure  and  pain  are  so 
restricted  in  what  they  directly  bring  before  our 
thought  that  they  give  no  adequate  idea  of  the  working 
of  experience.  ‘  Experience  ’  works  in  different  ways 
according  as  the  agreeable  or  disagreeable  results  are 
of  one  variety  or  another:  it  will  be  in  the  interest  of 
clearness,  therefore,  to  make  a  few  simple  distinctions 
in  the  kind  of  result  we  have  to  deal  with. 

1.  Definite  sense  experiences ,■ — pleasures  and  pains 
in  the  primary  sense,  together  with  other  “original 
satisfiers  and  annoyers”  of  which  Professor  Thorndike 
speaks,  such  as  bitter  tastes,  hindrances  of  motion,  con¬ 
tact  with  objects  of  aversion  or  disgust.2 

2  The  Original  Nature  of  Man,  pp.  123  ff. 


THE  METHODS  OF  EXPEBIENCE 


183 


The  relation  of  any  such  sensible  annoyer  to  the 
course  of  action  is  a  purely  empirical  fact.  Nature 
might  have  made  flame,  so  far  as  the  child’s  insight 
goes,  as  innocuous  as  incense.  It  might  have  made  those 
unpalatable  lady-bugs  pecked  at  by  Lloyd  Morgan’s 
deservedly  noted  chicks  as  sweet  as  corn.  The  attribute 
has  to  be  learned  as  a  fact,  by  the  method  of  contiguity. 
It  is  imperative  that  objects  of  the  attractive  but  dan¬ 
gerous  class  should  thereafter  be  divided  into  the  noc¬ 
uous  and  the  innocuous,  and  distinguished  by  signs :  the 
fate  of  our  individual  may  depend  on  success  in  finding 
such  a  sign.  But  the  imperative  is  categorical  in  the 
sense  that  it  offers  no  reasons  for  its  existence. 

2.  General  depression  or  elation.  Every  vital  se¬ 
quence  has  its  bodily  reverberation  as  well  as  its  sensi¬ 
ble  contents.  A  general  sense  of  physical  well-being  or 
the  reverse  may  accompany  the  end  of  a  course  of  be¬ 
havior,  or  may  come  as  an  after-effect  more  or  less 
belated.  This  ccenaesthetic  condition  may  be  of  the  same 
quality  as  the  sensible  result  of  the  behavior,  but  it  may 
also  be  of  opposite  quality,  as  in  the  disagreeable  after¬ 
clap  of  an  agreeable  indulgence. 

To  bring  these  vaguer  physical  experiences  into  con¬ 
nection  with  the  original  impulse  and  its  direct  pleas¬ 
ures  and  pains  requires  some  mental  span,  especially 
when  they  are  of  contrary  quality.  Thus,  after  any 
strenuous  exertion  there  normally  follows  the  depres¬ 
sion  of  fatigue ;  yet  if  the  direct  sensible  results  of  the 
effort  have  been  pleasant,  fatigue  seems  to  have  no 
tendency  to  alter  the  sequence.  In  primitive  self-con¬ 
sciousness,  the  flux  of  bodily  conditions  is  taken  for 


184 


EXPERIENCE 


granted.  The  same  is  true  in  even  greater  measure  of 
the  remoter  after-effects.  Our  orgiastic  ancestors  pre¬ 
sumably  suffered  from  their  excesses  more  or  less  as 
we  do ;  yet  there  are  few  signs  that  they  habitually  put 
two  and  two  together.  But  when  the  causal  connection 
is  observed,  and  the  enjoyment  (for  example)  is  recog¬ 
nized  as  a  deceitful  enjoyment,  there  will  be  some  modi¬ 
fication  of  the  next  response  to  that  invitation,  whether 
or  not  the  response  is  inhibited.  And  further,  there 
will  be  a  degree  of  insight  into  the  meaning  of  this  con¬ 
nection  of  effect  with  cause ;  for  the  beginning  of  seeing 
why  a  given  cause  should  have  a  given  effect,  is  the 
condition  of  seeing  that  there  is  any  causal  connection 
at  all.  Hence  the  modification  that  takes  place  will  not 
be  a  wholly  random  one,  but  will  take  the  direction  of 
escaping  that  particular  logical  sequence. 

3.  Mental  after-image .  Distinct  from  all  peripheral 
consequences  of  a  sequence  is  a  central  comment  which 
may  be  subconscious  or  distinct,  but  is  probably  always 
present  in  the  human  being.  It  is  most  noticeable, 
naturally  enough,  when  it  is  contrary  in  quality  to 
either  the  sensible  result  or  the  general  bodily  con¬ 
dition;  as  when  one  succeeds  in  a  competition  and 
finds  himself  somehow  dissatisfied  with  his  success, 
or  as  when  one  fails  and  finds  himself  at  peace  in 
his  failure.  Such  a  mental  after-image  may  appear 
at  first  as  irrationally  connected  with  my  experience 
as  the  burning  with  the  candle-flame.  But  it  differs  from 
the  preceding  types  of  experience  in  the  circumstance 
that  the  comment  is  recognized  as  being  not  nature’s 
comment,  but  my  own.  There  is  the  same  demand  as 


THE  METHODS  OF  EXPERIENCE  185 

before  for  analysis  and  indnction;  bnt  this  time  I  am 
required  to  understand.  This  kind  of  experience  has 
snch  a  crucial  bearing  upon  the  process  of  revising  my 
behavior  that  we  must  illustrate  it  in  greater  detail. 

I  have  a  disobedient  child ;  and  upon  an  accumulation 
of  petty  refusals  to  obey,  I  act  upon  the  advice  of  a 
contemporary  sage,  6  ‘  Never  punish  a  child  except  in 
anger.”  I  secure  attention  and  compliance,  and  leave 
a  fairly  permanent  impression;  I  go  away  satisfied. 
I  suffer  from  no  physical  depression.  But  in  time, 
perhaps,  my  sense  of  triumph  abates,  or  becomes  ob¬ 
scured  by  a  counter  uneasiness.  And  when  I  analyze 
the  experience,  I  find  that  it  refers  to  a  defect  in  my 
achievement:  I  gained  what  I  defined  for  myself, — 
namely,  compliance;  but  obedience  I  have  not  gained. 
When  I  gave  rein  to  the  pugnacious  behavior,  my  will 
had  defined  its  object  as  the  destruction  of  a  state  of 
mind  too  little  impressed  with  the  importance  of  my 
own.  But  I  have  not  conveyed  to  my  child  any  positive 
conviction  on  that  point,  and  so  I  have  gained  no  genu¬ 
ine  authority.  My  strategy  has  been  in  some  measure 
self-defeating.  The  mental  after-image  of  my  result  is 
a  negative  after-image. 

Such  an  after-image  may  have  sufficient  potency  to 
reverse  the  judgment  of  the  other  types  of  experience. 
No  one  can  engage  in  a  brisk  fight  without  incurring 
much  physical  pain,  and  experiencing  subsequent  de¬ 
pression;  yet  these  circumstances  are  not  in  the  least 
competent  to  deter  an  enthusiastic  fighter.  It  would  be 
false  psychology  to  explain  this  as  a  matter  of  the  bal¬ 
ance  of  pleasure  over  pain ;  it  is  a  question  of  the  posi- 


186 


EXPERIENCE 


tive  after-image.  The  pursuit  of  pleasure  among  young 
people  is  still  more  or  less  orgiastic  and  physically 
expensive;  yet  so  long  as  the  mental  after-images  are 
favorable,  the  efforts  and  depressions  are  judged  worth 
the  cost.  If  they  become  unfavorable,  the  degree  of 
pleasure  does  not  save  them.  We  incline  to  estimate 
the  human  worth  of  a  woman  by  the  degree  of  the 
deterrent  effect  which  the  pain  of  childbirth  may  have 
upon  her.  By  all  the  laws  of  effect,  if  pleasure  and  pain 
were  the  controlling  factors,  the  first  child  should  com¬ 
monly  be  the  last.  It  is  the  mental  after-image  which 
normally  determines  the  destiny  of  that  instinctive  se¬ 
quence.  In  fact,  there  are  few  of  the  vital  experiences 
of  humanity  that  do  not  entail  a  weight  of  pain  and 
labor  such  as  does  in  fact  deter  those  in  whom  prudence 
is  the  highest  virtue.  And  I  do  not  ignore  the  fact  that 
the  mental  after-image  varies  markedly  with  one’s 
general  theory  of  the  universe.  But  I  am  here  pointing 
out  simply  a  law  of  human  nature  as  a  fact  to  be  reck¬ 
oned  with:  it  is  the  mental  after-image  which  deter¬ 
mines  whether  a  given  sequence  shall  be  confirmed  or 
weakened ,  and  how  it  shall  be  modified .  If  the  after¬ 
image  is  positive,  any  discomfort  is  prevented  from 
eating  into  the  allurement  of  the  stimulus ;  if  it  is  nega¬ 
tive,  any  delight  is  prevented  from  enhancing  it. 

The  nature  of  this  after-image  should  be  evident 
from  our  previous  discussion.  It  is  the  reaction  of 
the  whole  will  upon  the  partial  impulse,  when  the  full 
meaning  of  that  impulse  is  perceived  in  the  light  of 
its  results.  It  is  not  necessarily  a  moral  reaction; 
remorse,  shame,  aesthetic  revolt,  etc.,  are  its  clarified 


THE  METHODS  OF  EXPERIENCE 


187 


varieties.  Its  significance  may  simply  be,  “This  is,  or 
is  not,  what  on  the  whole  I  want”;  “I  was  a  fool”; 
“I  hit  it  right.”  In  the  unfinished  condition  of  our 
instincts  (and  the  slightness  of  our  experience)  every 
course  of  action  is  launched  more  or  less  hypotheti¬ 
cally.  It  is  my  theory,  as  I  make  my  decision,  that  this 
is  what  I  want  to  do;  yet  I  am  aware  that  there  is 
some  doubt  about  it,  and  that  I  shall  not  be  sure  until 
the  returns  are  all  in.  The  mental  after-image  is  the 
answer  to  the  question  involved  in  this  tentative  state 
of  mind. 

If  the  after-image  is  negative,  the  natural  result  will 
be  a  new  hypothesis  for  dealing  with  a  similar  situation. 
And  the  transformation  of  instinct,  under  experience, 
consists  essentially  in  the  series  of  hypotheses  which  a 
given  mind  adopts, — hypotheses  about  the  ways  in 
which  impulses  are  to  be  followed  in  order  to  satisfy 
the  complete  will.  This  being  the  case,  it  is  evident  that 
the  series  of  these  successive  transformations  must 
approach,  as  a  goal,  an  interpretation  of  the  impulse 
in  question  in  terms  of  the  individual’s  own  variety  of 
the  will-to-power.  And  inasmuch  as  each  successive 
hypothesis  is  built  on  the  error  of  the  preceding  one, 
the  process  might  well  be  called,  in  analogy  with  Plato’s 
method  of  finding  true  ideas,  a  dialectical  process.  The 
work  of  experience  is  the  dialectic  of  the  will. 


CHAPTER  XXIV 


THE  DIALECTIC  OF  THE  WILL: 

THE  INDIVIDUAL  AND  CUSTOM 

WE  have  frequently  referred  to  the  effect  of  ex¬ 
perience  upon  the  instinct  of  pugnacity.  Let  me, 
then,  illustrate  my  view  of  the  dialectic  of  the  will  by  a 
series  of  transformations  of  pugnacity  which  may  rep¬ 
resent,  somewhat  symbolically,  the  experience  of  indi¬ 
viduals,  accumulating  as  the  experience  of  the  race  up 
to  a  certain  point. 

I 

In  its  original  and  crudest  form,  pugnacity  makes 
for  the  simple  and  radical  destruction  of  its  object. 
This  is  what  it  ‘means. ’  If  this  impulse  appears  in  a 
mind  which  is  incapable  of  any  social  interest  in  its 
object,  the  slaying  of  the  opponent  may  be  an  entirely 
satisfactory  result.  The  mental  after-image  may  be 
positive. 

But  in  most  of  the  higher  animals  this  is  not  the 
case.  Destruction  brings,  as  we  have  noted,  a  degree 
of  defeat  of  one’s  total  wish;  there  is  at  least  enough 
interest  in  the  survival  of  the  opposed  mind  so  that 
its  chagrin,  its  acknowledgment  of  the  victor,  has  a 
value.  The  hypothesis,  “I  want  destruction,”  changes 
into* the  hypothesis,  “I  want  revenge .”  Shand  has 
collected  a  number  of  instances  in  which  animals  have 


THE  DIALECTIC  OF  THE  WILL 


189 


with  apparent  deliberation  refrained  from  destroying 
in  order  to  take  satisfaction  in  the  suffering  or  dis¬ 
comfiture  of  the  enemy.  I  wish  to  point  out  that  this 
revision  takes  place  quite  in  independence  of  any  social 
constraint  upon  the  fighting  impulse. 

Though  the  successive  interpretations  of  pugnacity 
are  likely  to  retain  their  hold  in  certain  relations  while 
showing  their  defects  in  others,  yet  revenge,  like  de¬ 
struction,  tends  to  invade  every  relation  of  life.  Within 
members  of  any  given  group  when  murder  is  recog¬ 
nized  as  undesirable,  wrath  is  likely  to  take  everywhere 
the  form  of  revenge,  whether  in  the  ‘tit  for  tat*  of  chil¬ 
dren,  or  in  the  petulant  relations  of  parents  and  off¬ 
spring,  or  in  the  more  deliberate  and  vindictive  eye- 
for-eye  quarrels  among  adults.  Revenge  has,  however, 
an  inherent  inconsistency  of  motive  which  is  bound 
to  produce,  in  the  regions  of  denser  sociability,  a 
further  revision  of  hypothesis. 

For  while  revenge  aims  to  leave  such  injury  as  to 
exclude  the  restoration  of  amicable  feelings,  and,  in¬ 
deed,  to  gloat  in  the  persistence  of  hatred  and  con¬ 
tempt,  one  has  need  of  the  presence  of  the  despised 
and  defeated  adversary  as  a  source  of  this  satisfaction ; 
revenge  squints  toward  the  maintenance  of  friendli¬ 
ness.  The  solving  of  this  puzzle  turns  revenge  into 
punishment ,  which  is  the  next  stage  of  the  developing 
perception  of  what  pugnacity  means. 

Punishment  aims  at  inflicting  pain,  but  without 
permanent  injury.  The  anatomy  of  the  infant  verte¬ 
brate  commonly  lends  itself  to  this  interpretation ;  and 
some  of  the  animals,  elephants  at  least,  have  acquired 


190 


EXPERIENCE 


the  same  technique  of  punishment  as  prevails  with 
human  parents.  Punishment  makes  a  discrimination 
between  the  evil  of  a  will  and  its  essential  nature,  just 
as  revenge  made  a  distinction  between  the  will  and 
the  life.  Punishment  is  an  interpretation  of  pugnacity 
as  meaning  the  elimination  of  an  evil  element  in  the 
will  of  another  while  retaining  the  integrity  of,  and 
the  regard  for,  that  will  as  a  whole.  Punishment  in¬ 
tends  to  reinstate  the  original  amity  of  the  disturbed 
relationship. 

When  this  discrimination  has  once  been  made,  it  is 
not  a  long  step  to  a  direct  aim  at  the  restoration  of 
the  integrity  of  that  will,  and  a  subordination  of  the 
effort  to  do  justice  to  the  defect.  It  may  be  an  empiri¬ 
cal  discovery  at  first,  that  a  soft  answer  may  in  some 
cases  satisfy  the  whole  aim  of  punishment,  and  have 
the  further  advantage  of  avoiding  the  bitterness  of 
humiliating  memory.  It  matters  not  how  the  hypothesis 
was  arrived  at ;  so  long  as  punishment  left  in  some  rela¬ 
tions  a  negative  after-image,  this  revision  was  bound 
to  be  hit  upon  sooner  or  later.  This  complete  suppres¬ 
sion  of  the  destructive  behavior  in  the  interest  of  a 
resolute  kindliness  may  not  be  the  last  word  in  the  de¬ 
velopment  of  the  pugnacious  impulse:  we  shall  have 
some  further  enquiry  to  make  on  this  point.1  But  it  is 
one  of  the  views  to  which  experience  leads. 

And  my  point  is  that  experience,  given  the  human 
mind  to  work  upon,  would  be  likely  to  lead  to  this  stage, 
quite  apart  from  the  disciplinary  action  of  society, 
and  quite  apart  from  the  teachings  of  religion,  simply 

i  Chapters  XLI,  XXXI,  XXXII,  XXVIII. 


THE  INDIVIDUAL  AND  CUSTOM 


191 


because  the  prior  interpretations  of  the  anger-impulse 
are  not  what  the  human  being,  on  the  whole,  wants. 

I  am  intentionally  omitting  all  reference  to  the  con¬ 
tributions  which  various  types  of  social  pressure,  eco¬ 
nomic,  political,  and  others,  make  to  this  result.  It  is 
far  from  my  purpose  to  ignore  or  minimize  the  extent 
of  these  contributions.  I  have  excluded  them  here,  be¬ 
cause  I  intend  to  speak  of  them  by  themselves;  and 
because  our  present  concern  has  been  to  find  a  method 
of  testing  whether  social  transformations  tend  to  dis¬ 
tort  human  nature,  and  to  carry  it  in  directions  which 
of  its  own  momentum  it  would  not  follow.  So  far  as 
pugnacity  is  concerned,  my  judgment  is, — from  the  con¬ 
siderations  here  put  down, — that  social  repressions  of 
the  fighting  impulse  and  ‘  civilization ’  of  its  expression 
are  not,  on  the  whole,  violently  counter  to  the  direction 
of  individual  growth.  The  dominant  trend  of  the  human 
will  here  seems  to  be,  at  least  roughly,  parallel  with 
the  demands  made  upon  it  by  society. 

In  a  complete  treatise  each  of  the  major  general 
instincts  should  be  examined  for  its  natural  dialectic. 
I  must  be  content  at  present  to  indicate  a  method  of 
work;  and  in  a  later  section  to  sketch  some  of  the 
tendencies  in  other  instincts. 

II 

Wherever  we  find  a  rough  agreement,  as  in  the  case 
of  pugnacity,  between  social  demands  and  the  counsels 
of  individual  experience,  one  suspects  a  causal  con¬ 
nection.  The  individual  result  may  be  the  cause  of  the 


192 


EXPERIENCE 


social  standard;  bnt  it  is  also  possible  that  the  social 
rule  may  be  the  cause  of  the  individual  attitude.  In  view 
of  the  strong  reasons  for  regarding  the  individual,  his 
experience  and  his  habits,  as  products  primarily  of 
society,  let  me  dwell  briefly  on  our  main  thesis,  that 
the  individual  will  has  an  independent  course  of 
growth,  a  direction  of  its  own. 

Everything  an  individual  becomes,  every  habit  he 
acquires,  will  bear  the  mark  of  all  the  forces  that  have 
been  steadily  at  work  upon  him.  We  say  that  his  will 
has  its  bent,  and  that  whatever  his  mind  becomes  will 
show  the  trace  of  it :  this  does  not  exclude  the  fact  that 
society  also  leaves  its  mark  on  every  developed  trait. 
Hence  one  who  sees  that  the  social  effect  is  everywhere 
may  easily  leap  to  the  conclusion  that  it  is  everything : 
and  that  the  individual  is  a  mere  term  in  a  social 
process. 

Social  custom,  he  will  observe,  shapes  individual 
habit :  individual  habit  perpetuates  social  custom :  the 
cycle  is  self -continuing.  Hence  social  groups  breed 
true :  the  French  type  reproduces  itself,  never  by  mis¬ 
take  developing  a  Scotch  character ;  and  this  is  not  be¬ 
cause  the  organic  germ-plasm  is  distinctive,  but  be¬ 
cause  the  group-customs  are  distinctive,  and  individual 
ways  of  life  have  no  other  such  potent  source  as  these 
social  ways. 

According  to  Professor  Dewey,  custom  preserves 
itself  not  alone  in  the  fact  of  habit,  but  in  the  verv  con- 
science  of  the  individual.  For  “  habit  is  energy  organ¬ 
ized  in  certain  channels.  When  interfered  with,  it  swells 


THE  INDIVIDUAL  AND  CUSTOM 


193 


as  resentment  and  as  an  avenging  force  .  .  .  breach 
of  custom  or  habit  is  the  source  of  sympathetic  resent¬ 
ment,  ’ ,2  and  thus  of  the  sense  of  wrong  itself. 

Now  certain  it  is  that  human  habits  do  not  form 
themselves  in  vacuo  by  dint  of  solitary  trial  and  error, 
nor  yet  at  the  dictation  of  an  all-sufficient  hereditary 
impulse.  The  marvelous  plasticity  of  the  human  infant 
means  not  only  a  capacity  to  receive  suggestion,  but 
a  high  degree  of  helplessness  without  tutelage.  It  needs 
its  social  inheritance  not  less  than  its  organic  heredity ; 
it  has  a  hunger  for  authoritative  guidance  quite  as 
aboriginal  as  its  hunger  for  food.  Powerful  as  its  in¬ 
stinctive  dispositions  may  become ,  their  strength  is 
largely  due  to  social  encouragement;  and  an  instinct 
that  is  not  helped  into  action,  so  far  from  smouldering 
as  a  ‘  repressed  *  energy,  is  hardly  able  to  make  itself 
felt  as  a  directed  craving.  Professor  C.  C.  Josey  goes 
so  far  as  to  say  that  “instinct  must  be  expressed  before 
it  can  be  repressed” ;3  so  that  whatever  repression 
society  exercises  is  a  limitation  of  what  society  itself 
has  called  into  being,  and  not  a  curtailment  of  innate 
powers  clamoring  for  their  rightful  outlet.  In  brief, 
the  human  individual  cannot  be  itself  except  at  the  cost 
of  becoming  one  of  its  kind :  whatever  its  original  self¬ 
hood  or  subjectivity  may  be,  it  is  no  sufficient  source 
of  conduct.  The  Bergsonian  elan  vital ,  when  taken  as 
separate  from  matter,  as  pure  inwardness,  is  but  “a 
blind  onward  push  or  impetus  ...  as  likely  to  turn  out 

2  Human  Nature  and  Conduct,  p.  76. 

3  Instinct  in  Social  Philosophy,  p.  264. 


194 


EXPEKIENCE 


destructive  as  creative.”4  This  is  the  force  of  the  prag¬ 
matic  and  of  the  kindred  Hegelian  contention. 

But  does  all  this  mean  that  the  individual  will  is  not 
also  a  factor  in  what  it  becomes?  Does  it  mean  that 
society  can  so  much  as  impose  upon  it  a  single  habit 
without  its  own  consent  and  conspiracy?  Certainly  not. 

For  the  original  instinct  of  the  individual  is  not  a 
directionless  elan  vital:  it  has  a  native  trend  which 
shows  itself  in  its  reactions  upon  custom.  It  relies  on 
custom,  or  some  sort  of  social  suggestion,  to  set  its 
habits  in  motion ;  but  it  receives  all  custom  tentatively 
as  an  hypothesis  in  its  own  dialectic,  the  mental  after¬ 
image  of  every  such  performance  of  adoption  or  imita¬ 
tion  is  its  own ,  and  the  consequent  modification  is  its 
own.  For  note  that  custom  is  never  adopted  without 
change :  hence  the  social  process  is  not  precisely  circu¬ 
lar.  Custom  which  is  taken  up  into  the  individual  will 
and  reissued  as  habit  bears  the  marks  of  the  issuer: 
it  is  now  “his”  habit,  no  longer  “society’s”  custom. 
Hence  customs  are  perpetually  being  readjusted  to 
the  will,  and  not  alone  the  will  to  custom.  “Impulses 
are  the  pivots  upon  which  the  re-organization  of  activi¬ 
ties  turns ;  they  are  the  agencies  of  deviation,  for  giving 
new  directions  to  old  habits  and  changing  their 
quality”;5  and  that  which  thus  gives  direction  cannot 
conceivably  be  a  directionless  force. 

Nor  is  it  custom  that  produces  conscience:  for  a 
breach  of  custom  is  wholly  incompetent  to  produce  a 
moral  resentment,  however  much  it  may  produce  trepi- 

4  Dewey,  Human  Nature  and  Conduct,  p.  74. 

5  Dewey,  Human  Nature  and  Conduct,  p.  93. 


THE  INDIVIDTJAL  AND  CUSTOM 


195 


dation,  unless  the  custom  were  already  accorded  the 
quality  of  i rightness’  at  the  bar  of  individual  feeling. 
If  custom  were  the  source  of  conscience,  all  custom 
must  be  right,  save  where  it  conflicts  with  other  custom : 
the  ultimate  court  is  custom,  and  “The  mores  can  make 
anything  right.  ’ ’  But  the  illusion  of  the  moral  ultimacy 
of  custom,  and  of  the  consequent  moral  equivalence  of 
customs  in  different  societies  and  ages  (an  illusion  to 
which  hospitable  minds  are  subject  when  immersed  in 
folklore),  cannot  survive  the  perception  that  con¬ 
science  shows  itself  most  notably  in  individual  devia¬ 
tions  from  custom/  and  in  an  initiative  which  slowly 
brings  changes  of  custom  after  it.6  So  far  as  the  report 
of  conscience  is  embodied  in  the  mental  after-image, 
it  is  evident  that  the  dialectic  of  individual  experience 
carries  it  naturally  in  the  direction  of  moral  standards. 
In  this  sense,  man,  if  not  by  nature  good,  has  a  natural 
bent  to  goodness.  It  requires  no  grace  of  custom  to 
make  a  courteous  or  a  kindly  nature,  such  as  occurs 
sporadically  in  the  wildest  surroundings ;  and  whether 
or  not  integrity,  honor,  courage,  magnanimity,  shine 
by  their  own  light,  they  shine,  in  any  society,  in  contrast 
to  the  prescriptive  level  of  the  mores,  and  as  traits  of 
individual  wills. 

We  maintain,  therefore,  that  the  will  has  a  way  of 
its  own,  through  and  athwart  custom.  Only  thus  can  we 
so  much  as  enquire  how  society  affects  that  original 
bent.  We  proceed  to  that  enquiry. 


«  Cf.  above,  pp.  117  et  seq. 


PART  V 


SOCIETY 


CHAPTER  XXV 


SOCIAL  MODELLING 

IF  human  instincts,  left  to  the  teachings  of  expe¬ 
rience,  would  grow  very  much  as  society  tries  to 
model  them,  why  not  leave  them  more  completely  to 
their  own  growth?  Our  result  so  far  supplies  a  good 
argument  for  greater  freedom  from  social  constraint, 
if  not  for  anarchy.  Social  interference  with  natural 
growth  is  based,  we  know,  upon  a  degree  of  distrust 
of  human  nature:  and  when  we  perceive  that  human 
nature  has  its  own  inward  righting-tendency,  its  *  dia¬ 
lectic,’  the  distrust  seems  unjustified:  social  modelling 
appears  as  an  elaborate  social  meddling. 

Attempts  to  steady  an  ark  that  will  steady  itself  are 
worse  than  unnecessary:  they  prevent  the  finding  of 
real  reasons  for  preferring  one  mode  of  behavior  to 
another.  The  social  reason  is  always  at  one  remove 
from  the  real  reason,  vitiated  as  it  is  by  all  the  motives 
that  play  for  or  against  conformity.1  And  further,  so 
far  as  society  loses  the  invaluable  guidance  of  that  still, 
small  voice,  the  mental  after-image,  which  governs 
growth,  how  can  we  be  assured  that  its  transformations 
shall,  in  the  main,  be  other  than  deformations?  Work¬ 
ing,  as  society  does,  through  ‘sanctions,’  that  is, 
through  artificial  pressures  of  reward  and  punishment, 

i  Cf.  Holt,  The  Freudian  Wish ;  Herbert  Spencer,  Education,  etc., 
for  expressions  of  this  ideal. 


200 


SOCIETY 


the  amount  of  such  pressure  may  be  an  index  of  the 
amount  of  warping  which  nature  is  likely  to  suffer 
under  its  control. 

The  tabus  under  which  we  now  live  are  indeed  but 
phantoms  of  the  ferocities  which  helped  to  create  the 
first  ‘ cakes  of  custom.’  Consequently  we  cannot  point 
to  any  such  mutilations  or  immolations  of  nature,  such 
head-hunting  or  widow-burnings,  such  foot-bindings 
or  soul-bindings,  as  cumber  to  satiety  the  annals  of  the 
folkways.  Personal  liberty  has  won  many  battles;  but 
is  its  work  complete?  If  such  natural  expressions  as 
laughter  and  tears,  coughing  and  sneezing,  are  still 
subject  to  social  regulation,  what  shall  be  said  of  the 
course  of  our  deeper  impulses,  our  antipathies,  our 
affections,  our  fears?  Society  is  not  precisely  hostile 
to  our  passions  any  more  than  it  is  hostile  to  our 
sneezing ;  but  it  asserts  jurisdiction  over  the  ways  and 
methods  of  each.  And  it  makes  these  ways  and  means 
so  much  the  essence  of  the  agreement  that  unless  the 
impulse  can  he  satisfied  in  the  prescribed  way,  society 
inclines  to  demand  that  it  shall  not  be  satisfied  at  all. 
There  are  approved  ways  of  earning  a  living,  as  there 
are  approved  ways  of  winning  a  bride,  but  who  can 
recognize  under  the  activities  of  shop  and  factory  and 
office  an  expression  of  natural  impulses  to  hunt,  to  fish, 
to  gather  where  one  has  not  strewn?  In  its  ways  of  food¬ 
getting,  civilization  has  listened  to  advisers  more  im¬ 
perious  than  instinct;  yet  it  insists  that  unless  one 
follow  these  ways,  he  shall  not  have  a  man’s  living  at 
all. 

As  for  the  weapons  which  produce  conformity,  if 


SOCIAL  MODELLING 


201 


the  social  lash  has  lost  its  barbarity,  it  has  not  lost 
its  sting.  Fears  of  death  and  beyond-death  are  seldom 
invoked ;  yet  the  fears  which  spring  from  ambition  and 
from  multiform  social  attachments  and  dependencies 
are  hardly  less  powerful.  Man’s  need  of  his  fellows  is 
so  great,  and  increasingly  great,  that  he  will  not  will¬ 
ingly  forfeit  a  large  measure  of  their  favor.  Besides 
this,  the  knowledge  and  dread  of  our  own  ignorance  in 
the  management  of  life  can  he  counted  upon  to  herd  the 
mass  of  mankind  into  the  beaten  path,  while  ease,  cer¬ 
tainty,  and  the  feeling  of  at-homeness  serve  to  keep 
them  there.  For  the  more  adventurous  spirits,  the  finer 
but  not  less  terrifying  punishments  of  ridicule  and 
exclusion  are  held  in  reserve.  Hence  ‘ convention’  is  a 
word  which  still  conveys  a  sense  of  enforced  deviation 
from  the  natural.  What  society  imagines  it  wants  im¬ 
poses  itself  upon  what  1  want,  and  buries  it. 

Our  attitude  toward  convention  is  for  the  most  part 
not  only  docile,  but  unreasoning.  The  modelling  pro¬ 
cess,  working  by  suggestion  and  imitation  as  well  as 
by  overt  control,  has  done  its  work  before  the  critical 
powers  are  fully  awake.  To  many  minds,  it  is  something 
of  a  recommendation  of  usage  that  we  hold  to  it,  as  to 
a  religious  mystery,  with  the  blind  adherence  of  faith. 
Yet  we  are  destined  to  reach  self-conscious  judgment 
in  these  matters  as  in  all  others.  We  cannot  hold  a 
custom  against  reason,  when  once  reason  has  become 
competent  to  deal  with  it.  On  the  other  hand,  it  would 
be  a  questionable  procedure  to  argue  from  the  general 
unreasoning  acceptance  of  any  social  habit  or  belief 
that  there  are  no  reasons  for  it.  While  we  are  bound 


202 


SOCIETY 


to  challenge  whatever  we  can  see  to  be  unnatural  or 
outworn,  yet  so  deep  are  the  roots  of  convention  that 
most  customs  and  prejudices  deserve  a  second  glance 
— he  takes  great  risks  who  denies  to  any  of  them  a 
meaning. 

To  take  one  example  from  among  many,  I  find  this 
risk  too  lightly  run  in  a  recent  chapter  by  that  always 
informing  and  vigorous  thinker,  Professor  E.  A.  Ross. 
He  is  dealing  with  a  number  of  conventional  beliefs 
which  modify  behavior.2  He  cites,  among  others,  the 
belief  “that  manual  labor  is  degrading,”  a  belief  less 
surprising  among  the  upper  castes  who  profit  by  it  than 
among  manual  laborers  themselves.  Yet  these  latter 
also  give  it  an  unreasoned  acceptance,  thinks  Profes¬ 
sor  Ross,  as  seen  in  their  ambitions  for  themselves  and 
their  children  to  escape  from  the  ranks  of  toil  into  the 
ranks  of  the  long-nailed  mandarins.  But  why  translate 
this  conventional  direction  of  ambition,  so  far  as  it  is 
an  article  of  faith  rather  than  a  desire  for  greater  in¬ 
come,  as  a  belief  that  manual  labor  is  degrading  ?  Why 
not  recognize  in  it  a  highly  reasonable  belief  that  a  man 
should  by  all  means  have  a  mental  survey  of  his  own 
work,  and  that  the  particular  kind  of  manual  labor 
which  is  robbed  of  all  mental  interest  is  degrading. 
There  is  a  false  note  in  the  desire  to  get  away  from  toil ; 
but  beside  it  is  a  deep  and  true  note  in  the  desire  to  live, 
as  man  was  made  to  live,  by  a  union  of  toil  with  wit. 
As  a  second  meaningless  convention,  our  author  men¬ 
tions  the  belief  that  “pecuniary  success  is  the  only 

2  E.  A.  Ross,  Social  Psychology ,  eh.  vii. 


SOCIAL  MODELLING 


203 


success.”  No  doubt  society,  less  by  wbat  it  says  than 
by  the  turn  of  its  eyes,  instils  an  admiration  for  the 
man  who  bas  made  his  fortune.  This  value-attitude,  if 
not  exclusive  among  us,  is  certainly  overdeveloped; 
but  can  we  say  that  it  is  essentially  unreasonable?  If 
command  of  the  fruits  of  the  earth  is  the  normal  and 
destined  position  for  man,  why  should  one  who  has 
achieved  such  a  position,  and  in  so  doing  has  shown 
large  powers  of  one  kind  or  another,  not  receive  the 
recognition  that  he,  in  so  far,  has  succeeded?  It  is 
a  man’s  work  to  make  a  fortune,  and  under  normal 
circumstances  a  measure  of  ability.  It  is  not  the  only 
kind  of  work  that  can  be  called  a  man’s  work,  but  it  is 
typical.  It  has  the  appeal  that  the  qualities  it  calls  out 
can  be  understood  by  everybody.  We  must  define  this 
convention  rather  by  the  values  it  justly  appreciates,  if 
there  are  any  such,  than  by  its  myopic  aberrations,  its 
exclusion  of  other  values.  And  unless  we  are  prepared 
to  deny  that  the  normal  result  of  economic  effort,  the 
mastery  of  nature,  is  a  good,  we  must  expect  to  deal, 
for  all  time,  with  a  disposition  to  admire  the  man  who 
has  become  ruler  over  many  things.  Another  mean¬ 
ingless  convention,  according  to  Ross,  is  “that  the  con¬ 
sumption  of  stimulants  or  narcotics  by  women  is  un¬ 
womanly.”  But  I  desist.  There  are  few  prejudices 
or  ceremonial  observances  for  which  the  users  are  en¬ 
tirely  ready  with  their  reasons.  If  they  were,  these 
elements  of  mental  usage  would  forfeit  the  thought¬ 
saving  merits  of  custom.  But  if  we  forthwith  pronounce 
an  observance  unreasonable  because  it  is  unreasoned, 


204 


SOCIETY 


we  forgo  all  possibility  of  penetrating  into  its  often 
subtle  and  subconscious  grounds. 

Rebellion  we  have  always  with  us,  and  we  need  it. 
It  trims  the  dead  wood,  and  summons  latent  reasons 
into  the  open.  Of  the  rebellion  of  to-day,  it  is  perhaps 
significant  that  it  complains  less  of  the  common  cus¬ 
toms  of  the  tribe,  so  far  as  they  affect  the  majority, 
than  of  the  incidental  hardship  which  any  custom,  by 
its  uniformity,  may  work  in  special  cases.  Society 
tyrannizes  less  by  mistaking  the  conditions  for  the  wel¬ 
fare  of  the  mass  of  men,  than  by  classifying  individuals, 
who  never  quite  fit  the  categories.3  We  may  approach 
our  enquiry,  then,  without  antecedent  bias  either  hos¬ 
tile  to  convention  or  in  favor  of  it,  simply  as  a  question 
of  fact.  How  does  society  tend  to  modify  individual 
behavior? 

3  See,  for  example,  Elsie  Clews  Parsons,  Social  Freedom. 


CHAPTER  XXVI 


MAIN  DIRECTIONS  OF  SOCIAL  MODELLING 

.  v\ 

FOR  the  sake  of  proportion,  our  first  duty  is  always 
to  the  obvious.  We  must  remind  ourselves  at  the 
outset  of  the  most  general  way  in  which  social  rules 
bear  upon  the  development  of  instinct.  Generally  speak¬ 
ing,  then,  custom  continues  the  direction  of  develop¬ 
ment  struck  out  by  individual  experience,  and  facili¬ 
tates  it. 

More  in  detail :  it  abbreviates  the  tedious  process  of 
learning  from  experience;  it  saves  from  experiments 
too  costly  for  the  individual, — such,  for  example,  as 
might  cost  him  his  life,  or  his  health;  it  speeds  the 
whole  process  of  interpretation,  through  its  own  ac¬ 
quired  skill  in  imparting  its  maxims ;  and  on  account  of 
all  this  economy,  it  carries  the  process  farther  than 
personal  experimentation  could  hope  to  reach.  It  also 
preserves  a  common  direction  of  growth,  and  at  least 
a  minimum  level  of  achievement  in  a  great  number  of 
individuals.  Society  is  to  each  of  its  members  a  store¬ 
house  of  technique:  and  as  little  as  the  learner  could 
spare  the  mechanical  technique  of  the  socially  trans¬ 
mitted  arts  and  sciences,  could  he  dispense  with  the 
accumulated  capital  of  wisdom  in  the  ways  of  behavior, 
the  folkways  of  his  own  tribe  and  time.  That  is,  he 


206 


SOCIETY 


could  not  spare  them  if  what  we  call  ‘progress’  is  to 
continue. 

To  say  that  social  action  continues  the  direction  of 
the  work  of  individual  experience  understates  the  case : 
it  continues  the  whole  work  of  organic  evolution.  Let 
me  mention  two  ways  in  which  this  continuation  is 
marked. 

1.  The  ‘vestibule  of  satisfaction’  is  prolonged.  By 
the  ‘vestibule’  of  a  satisfaction  I  mean  the  series  of 
preliminary  processes  which  lead  up  to  it.  Throughout 
the  animal  series,  we  can  trace  a  growing  elaboration 
of  instinctive  processes,  and  hence  a  prolonged  period 
of  suspense  between  the  first  stimulus  and  the  final 
satisfaction.  Consider  the  food-getting  processes,  and 
the  satisfaction  of  eating.  An  amoeba  ‘eats’  immediately 
upon  contact  with  a  food-particle, — if  this  activity  of 
surrounding  and  absorbing  may  be  called  eating.  The 
sea-anemone  has  to  observe  a  preliminary  or  two:  it 
must  use  its  tentacles  to  waft  the  food-bearing  water 
into  its  body  cavity.  When  organs  of  smell  and  vision 
exist,  they  imply  that  food  (as  well  as  danger)  is  to 
be  discerned  at  a  distance,  and  usually  that  the  animal 
thus  equipped  is  to  go  and  get  it.  Organs  of  chase  and 
combat  indicate  still  more  elaborate  preliminaries; 
with  hunting,  stalking,  and  killing,  the  vestibule  is  pro¬ 
longed  many  fold.  An  instinct  to  lay  up  stores  for 
winter  shows  that  a  farther  step  has  been  taken  in  the 
same  direction;  and  all  this  is  accomplished  without 
appealing  either  to  experience  or  to  social  instruction. 
Individual  experience  not  only  retraces  the  phyloge¬ 
netic  journey:  it  carries  farther  the  interpolation  of 


DIRECTIONS  OF  MODELLING 


207 


means  and  conditions  in  the  form  of  labor  and  fore¬ 
sight  between  hunger  and  consumption.  If  society,  then, 
intercalates  further  conditions  and  complexities,  it  is 
but  exceeding  Nature  at  her  own  game.  The  prolonging 
of  the  vestibule  goes  with  a  greater  reserve  of  tissue, 
and  a  finer  balancing  of  the  stimulus ;  so  that  the  period 
of  suspense  is  not  more  than  the  organism  is  fitted  to 
sustain.  The  general  principle  holds  good,  that  the 
farther  the  stimulus  is  from  the  satisfaction,  the  less 
its  intensity,  the  more  it  is  negligible,  and  therefore 
the  inconvenience  of  delay  or  even  of  ignoring  it  is 
negligible,  in  the  vital  economy. 

What  is  true  of  food-getting  is  obviously  true  like¬ 
wise  of  mating.  If  society  has  interposed  apparently 
artificial  conditions,  such  as  the  consent  of  the  partner, 
the  approval  of  a  social  representative,  a  ceremonial 
wedding,  it  is  but  embroidering  upon  the  theme  which 
Nature  had,  in  the  practices  of  quest  and  courtship, 
already  inserted  as  preliminaries  to  the  mating. 

This  conspiracy  of  all  the  phases  of  evolution  in 
prolonging  the  vestibule  of  satisfaction,  can  hardly 
be  looked  upon  as  an  end  in  itself,  from  the  biological 
standpoint,  though  it  implies  the  complication  and  de¬ 
velopment  of  the  animal  body.  It  means  simply  that  the 
organism  is  fit  to  live  in  a  more  complex  and  extended 
environment,  in  which  the  time-factor  and  the  ability 
to  wait  are  highly  important  factors  in  survival.  But 
from  the  psychological  standpoint,  the  scope  of  the 
process,  and  the  fact  that  satisfaction  is  hemmed  in  by 
an  increasing  number  of  conditions,  imply  an  immense 
development  of  the  meaning  of  each  part  of  the  long 


208 


SOCIETY 


sequence,  together  with  enhanced  powers  of  self-con¬ 
trol  at  its  beginnings. 

2.  Limitation  of  the  range  of  objects  with  which  one 
deals.  The  protozoon  must  deal  with  the  whole  world 
so  far  as  that  world  impinges  upon  it;  it  reacts  to 
everything  with  like  thoroughness  of  attention.  The 
same  organs  that  imply  a  lengthening  of  the  vestibule 
bring  also  a  power  of  selection.  The  higher  animal  re¬ 
acts  to  a  very  small  proportion  of  the  total  objects  that 
come  within  its  range  of  perception.  The  law  is  analo¬ 
gous  to  that  of  the  increase  of  power  in  an  optical  in¬ 
strument  ;  the  field  is  restricted  as  the  reach  increases. 
This  discrimination,  society  carries  farther.  It  pre¬ 
scribes  to  some  extent  what  I  may  not  eat,  whom  I  may 
not  fight,  and  whom  I  may  not  marry.  And  this  element 
of  artificiality  is  in  continuance  of  the  direction  of 
phylogenesis  and  of  experience,  as  before. 

These  circumstances  do  not  sanction  the  social  pro¬ 
cess  in  detail.  But  they  make  it  altogether  probable  that 
the  gross  normal  effect  of  society  upon  individual  be¬ 
havior  is  not  only  of  biological  value,  but  favorable  as 
well  to  that  gathering  of  meaning  which  is  the  business 
of  individual  growth.  For  a  more  accurate  knowledge 
of  what  I  want,  a  better  understanding  of  what  any 
instinct  means,  could  only  be  gained  by  better  exclud¬ 
ing  what  it  does  not  mean;  and  such  exclusion  would 
naturally  be  made  effective,  in  society,  by  setting  up 
preliminary  conditions  with  which  I  must  comply,  and 
by  defining  certain  objects  to  which  I  shall  not  react. 
If  all  custom  were  good  custom,  it  would  in  this  way 


DIRECTIONS  OF  MODELLING 


209 


add  to  the  meaning,  or  value,  of  all  behavior.  And  we 
are  justified  in  inferring  that,  of  its  own  nature,  society 
is  not  primarily  repressive. 

But  whether  all  custom,  or  any  custom,  is  normal 
custom  these  facts  can  give  no  hint.  In  actuality  society 
has  been  and  is  repressive ;  and  especially  in  three 
ways.  (1)  The  standards  and  ideals  it  sets  up  for  me 
to  follow  are  shaped  to  its  own  interest  rather  than  to 
mine, — for  society,  like  nature,  must  look  first  to  the 
group  and  only  secondarily  to  the  individual;  (2)  the 
material  equipment  and  scope  which  it  offers  me’Ts* 
curtailed  by  the  competing  needs  of  others, — and  there 
are  too  many  of  us  for  the  supply;  (3)  the  permitted 
modes  of  behavior  fall  into  fixed  institutional  forms, 
and  hamper  the  movements  of  any  life  that  grows 
beyond  them.  Social  modelling  can  be  good,  from  the 
standpoint  of  the  individual,  only  if  all  these  tendencies 
are  corrected. 

The  old  theory,  then,  that  “the  interests  of  the  indi¬ 
vidual  are  identical  with  the  interests  of  society”  we 
shall  not  unconditionally  accept.  Our  argument  so  far 
may  be  taken  as  a  confirmation  from  a  new  angle  of 
approach  of  the  notion  that  in  the  main  these  interests 
tend  to  agree,  but  not  of  the  notions  of  Hobbes,  Burke, 
Hegel,  and  others  which  seem  to  sanction  any  pressure 
society  might  choose  to  impose  upon  its  members.  We 
have  set  up  the  individual  life,  with  its  natural  dia¬ 
lectic,  as  the  standard  to  which  social  pressures  must 
conform;  and  by  the  aid  of  this  standard  we  propose 
now  to  outline  what  none  of  these  thinkers  has  given 


210 


SOCIETY 


us,  namely,  a  set  of  tests  whereby  we  can  distinguish 
a  good  social  order  from  a  bad  social  order,  considering 
in  turn  each  of  the  three  ways  in  which  societies  are 
likely  to  go  wrong. 


CHAPTER  XXVII 


IDEALS  AND  THEIR  RECOMMENDERS 


A  MAN  in  the  midst  of  a  society  which  is  trying 
.to  shape  him  is  not  to  be  thought  of  as  sur¬ 
rounded  by  pure  altruists.  Whatever  behavior  is  recom¬ 
mended  to  him  will  bear  some  trace  of  the  convenience 
of  the  source  of  recommendation.  The  virtue  of  labor 
in  the  eyes  of  its  employers  is  a  ‘  faithfulness  and  in¬ 
dustry J  which  smacks  of  acquiescence  in  statu  quo .  The 
ideal  citizen,  for  the  standpatter,  is  the  ‘loyal’  vessel 
of  party  authority  and  routine.  The  ideal  child  for  the 
overburdened  school  mistress  is  by  almost  physical 
necessity  the  ‘good’  boy,  not  too  beloved  of  his  fellows, 
more  docile  than  enterprising.  It  has  been  said  that 
the  excellence  of  wives  as  defined  by  husbands  shows 
similar  traits.  In  proportion  to  its  self-satisfaction, — 
and  the  tendency  of  all  aggregates  is  to  be  self-satis¬ 
fied, — any  group  is  prone  to  condemn  its  most  vigorous 
as  well  as  its  least  vigorous  members :  if  it  must  move 
forward,  it  keeps  a  mean  which  it  calls  golden ;  it  learns 
but  slowly  the  truth  of  Aristotle ’s  saying,  that  the  best 
rule  is  rule  over  the  best.  It  inclines  to  shape  its  mem¬ 
bers  to  its  own  ease,  not  to  their  advantage ;  it  supplies 
them  with  a  set  of  ideals  visibly  colored  by  its  own 
idler  interest. 

But  all  conversation  assumes  an  ultimate  equality, 


212 


SOCIETY 


even  that  between  master  and  slave,  or  between  society 
and  the  individual.  What  is  required  of  me  must  come 
professing  to  be  for  my  good.  Slaveholders,  Aristotle 
himself,  tried  to  think  slavery  beneficial  for  slaves. 
Interest  may  warp  the  particular  judgment;  but  the 
form  of  the  apology  reveals  the  principle  at  stake.  The 
interest  of  society  by  this  involuntary  confession,  is 
seen  to  have  no  authority  over  me  unless  it  is  also  my 
own  interest.  This  is  the  primary  and  original  ‘  right  ’ 
in  the  relations  of  whole  and  member:  a  man’s  right 
is  to  his  own  development;  the  right  of  society  exists 
only  where  its  own  interest  and  that  interest  coincide. 
And  structurally  (not  historically)  these  interests  do 
coincide,  not  more  because  the  member  needs  the  so¬ 
ciety  than  because  no  society  can  prefer  the  less  de¬ 
veloped  to  the  more  developed  member,  other  things 
equal.  Not  even  society,  then,  has  a  right  to  make 
use  of  a  person  as  a  mere  means  to  its  majestic  ends.1 

The  test  of  a  good  social  order,  then,  will  be  this: 
that  I  am  not  obliged  to  adopt  any  rule  of  conduct  be¬ 
cause  of  what  others  prefer  I  should  do  or  be,  unless 
I  also  have  or  can  have  that  same  preference.  Let  us 
state  this  test  in  the  form  of  a  postulate  or  demand 

1  There  can,  of  course,  be  no  legal  right  against  political  society,  by 
the  definition  of  a  legal  right  as  something  created  by  society  (how 
mighty  are  definitions ! ) .  By  the  same  sign  it  would  be  inaccurate  to 
speak  of  political  society  itself  as  having  legal  rights,  since  legal  rights 
are  something  which  it  confers  on  its  members.  But  those  who  thus 
argue  from  definitions  sometimes  forget  that  the  legal  right  is  a  specified 
form  of  a  more  generic  relationship;  and  that  under  this  generic  sense 
of  right,  questions  of  right  may  arise  between  two  such  unlike  persons 
as  state  and  individual,  or  society  and  individual. 


IDEALS  AND  THEIE  RECOMMENDERS  213 

which  every  good  society  must,  and  can,  comply  with : 

What  others  wish  me  to  he  must  he  identical 
with  what  I  myself  wish  to  he , — 

a  principle  which  we  may  call  the  postulate  of  identical 
ideals .  It  may  be  that  no  society,  no  actual  society, 
complies  with  the  requirement :  but  I  venture  to  think 
that  no  actual  society  despairs  of  complying  with  it 
or  fails  in  practical  ways  to  aim  at  it.  The  conditions 
of  social  life  everywhere  assume  that  however  wide  the 
original  disparity  between  what  I  think  I  would  like 
to  be,  and  what  my  environment  thinks  it  would  have 
me  be,  such  an  agreement  can  he  found  by  some  effort 
of  thought,  or  by  the  slow  working  of  social  arrange¬ 
ments,  or  both.  In  point  of  fact  there  are  arrangements 
apparently  as  natural  and  as  old  as  society  itself  which 
help  to  secure  precisely  the  agreement  required  by  the 
postulate.  I  shall  mention  the  most  important  of  these. 

1.  The  direct  impact  of  social  requirements  comes 
to  the  individual  through  the  most  altruistic  part  of 
the  social  shell.  This  is  especially  true  of  his  most 
plastic  years :  he  is  born  among  his  well-wishers.  And 
while  the  egoism  of  parents  has  also  to  be  reckoned 
with,  the  danger  of  social  tyranny  lies  rather  in  their 
lack  of  originality  than  in  their  lack  of  pride  in  the 
personal  growth  of  their  child.  It  is  always  possible 
Mhat,  as  filtered  through  the  medium  of  the  family,  the 
demand  of  society  will  strike  with  too  little  force  rather 
than  too  much.  For  the  identity  required  in  the  postu¬ 
late  calls  for  an  effort  on  the  part  of  the  individual  as 
well  as  upon  the  part  of  society,  especially  as  the  in- 


214 


SOCIETY 


dividual  cannot  be  said  to  know  without  much  drastic 
trial  what  in  particular  he  wishes  to  be. 

2.  Recommendership.  If  society  were  sufficiently 
self-conscious  to  perceive  that  this  immensely  impor¬ 
tant  ideal-making  function  is  everywhere  muddled  and 
adulterated  by  short-sighted  egoism,  its  own  included, 
it  might  be  imagined  as  referring  this  function  to  a 
carefully  chosen  and  disinterested  third  party. 

Such  an  imaginary  arbitrator  it  would  be  difficult 
to  realize  in  the  flesh.  He  must  be  no  member  of  society, 
either  in  its  capacity  as  impressing  ideals  or  in  its 
capacity  as  receiving  and  using  them.  He  would  never¬ 
theless  have  to  know  human  nature  to  the  bottom,  and 
the  necessities  of  social  order.  He  would  have  to  under¬ 
stand  all  parties,  all  social  conflicts,  and  all  occupa¬ 
tions,  and  yet  participate  in  none  of  them. 

Political  theory  has  now  and  again  attempted  to 
define  such  a  functionary,  inasmuch  as  the  logical  prob¬ 
lem  of  a  liberal  government  in  preventing  the  warping 
of  laws  by  political  tyranny  is  very  much  the  same  as 
ours.  This  problem  is:  so  to  organize  a  public  body 
that  to  every  possible  pair  of  parties  there  is  always 
a  third  party  to  pass  judgment  between  them,  even 
when  the  two  parties  are  the  public  as  a  whole  and  any 
part  or  member  thereof.  John  Locke  tried,  in  effect, 
to  provide  a  perfectly  general  solution  for  this  prob¬ 
lem,  and  all  but  succeeded.  His  ‘legislative’  is  a  good 
third  to  every  pair  of  parties  that  can  be  defined  among 
the  people,  including  executive  and  people,  and  also 
including  itself  as  part  of  the  people.  He  only  failed 
to  provide  for  a  third  party  between  the  legislative 


IDEALS  AND  THEIE  EECOMMENDEES  215 

in  office  and  the  people,  which  is  precisely  the  point  at 
which  we,  in  our  own  problem,  need  relief.  Here  Locke 
had  no  recourse  but  the  ‘  appeal  to  Heaven.’  And  we 
look  in  vain  in  any  subsequent  writer  or  political  device 
for  the  general  solution  of  our  problem. 

But  Rousseau,  approaching  the  problem  from  the 
other  end,  that  of  protecting  people  from  their  own 
idleness  and  ignorance,  saw  far  more  clearly  than 
Locke  the  conditions  for  finding  just  social  standards. 
“In  order  to  discover  the  social  rules  best  suited  to 
peoples,  a  superior  intelligence  would  be  required, 
which  should  behold  all  the  passions  of  men  without 
experiencing  any  of  them.  This  intelligence  would  have 
to  be  wholly  independent  of  our  nature  while  knowing 
it  through  and  through.  Its  own  welfare  would  have 
to  be  secure  apart  from  us ;  and  yet  it  must  be  ready 
to  concern  itself  with  our  welfare.  And  lastly,  it  would 
have  to  look  forward  in  the  march  of  time  to  a  distant 
consummation,  and  working  in  one  century  be  willing 
to  put  its  enjoyment  in  the  next.  It  would  take  gods  to 
give  laws  to  man.  ’ ’2  Surprisingly  like  what  we  thought 
necessary  to  protect  men  from  society  is  Rousseau’s 
view  of  what  is  necessary  to  protect  men  from  them¬ 
selves  ;  and  on  the  lips  of  the  supposed  believer  in  abso¬ 
lute  democracy,  the  sentiment  is  striking.  But  if  we  ask 
what  provision  Rousseau  would  make  to  secure  this 
ideal  giver  of  laws  we  find  no  answer ;  for  such  a  legis¬ 
lator  is  an  anomaly  in  Rousseau’s  state,  and  if  we  may 
judge  from  his  words,  in  any  state.  It  is  but  a  fiction, 
called  upon  to  do  the  work  of  a  reality.  ‘  ‘  This  sublime 

2  The  Social  Contract ,  Book  II,  ch.  vii. 


216 


SOCIETY 


reason,”  he  says,  almost  cynically,  “far  above  the 
range  of  the  common  herd,  is  that  whose  decisions  the 
actual  legislator  puts  into  the  month  of  the  immortals, 
in  order  to  constrain  by  (the  pretence  of)  divine 
authority  those  whom  human  prudence  could  not 
move/’  Thus  Rousseau  also  is  driven  to  an  appeal  to 
Heaven,  but  to  a  merely  dramatic  appeal.  To  impute 
in  this  way  an  unreal  divine  quality  to  what  is  after 
all  but  a  humanly  conceived  standard  of  behavior 
might  well  provide  the  needed  force;  but  unless  we 
could  also  ensure  the  divine  wisdom  and  justice,  this 
appeal  would  only  deepen  the  tyranny,  as  the  course 
of  history  may  show. 

Nevertheless,  the  arrangement  which  is  so  difficult 
from  the  standpoint  of  practical  statecraft  exists,  and 
has  existed  from  time  immemorial,  in  ordinary  social 
structure.  It  makes  use  of  a  common  property  of  the 
self-conscious  mind, — the  capacity  of  being,  while  im¬ 
mersed  in  the  stream  of  events,  at  the  same  time  re¬ 
flectively  aloof  from  them.  The  man  who  recommends 
to  others  what  were  good  to  be  done  without  having 
to  follow  his  own  teaching,  or  being  in  a  position  to 
do  so,  is  not  an  unknown  person,  nor  on  the  whole  an 
unwelcome  person.  And  it  has  been  found  possible  to 
devise  circumstances  which  give  his  announcement  of 
rules  and  ideals  so  much  detachment  from  the  usual 
cares  and  fears  of  the  casual  disinterested  observer, 
that  the  “appeal  to  Heaven’ ’  would  be  a  phrase  not 
wholly  unwarranted  in  his  case. 

Society,  in  short,  has  never  been  without  its  pro¬ 
fessional  1  Recommenders  ’ ;  and  it  has  never  failed  to 


IDEALS  AND  THEIR  RECOMMENDERS 


217 


accord  them  a  position  of  such  immunity  that  their 
words  are  as  nearly  as  possible  the  words  of  the  freed 
spirit.  In  ancient  times,  they  were  the  elders,  the 
shamans,  the  medicine  men,  the  prophets,  the  priests. 
In  latter  days,  these  also,  and  with  them  all  whose  work 
is  the  liberal  reflection  upon  human  life, — the  scholars, 
the  men  of  letters  and  of  art.  Such  men  live  voluntarily 
both  within  the  society  and  mentally  without  it;  in  the 
theological  phrase  their  mental  position  is  both  imma¬ 
nent  and  transcendent.  At  times  they  have  lived  in 
security  and  freedom  both  political  and  economic ;  but 
always  they  have  survived  only  so  far  as  men  have 
found  in  them  an  actual  performance  in  some  measure 
of  the  momentous  function  of  delineating  the  man  who 
is  at  once  fully  himself  and  fully  the  servant  of  the 
social  order.  They  have  done  their  work  more  or  less 
badly,  turbidly,  venally ;  but  in  spite  of  the  men,  man¬ 
kind  has  valued  the  function.  In  so  far  as  it  tolerates 
them,  organized  society  bears  witness  to  its  own  self- 
abnegation;  through  them  it  secures  the  unhampered 
force  of  its  own  severest  self-judgment.  The  original 
moral  nature  we  found  attaching  itself,  as  if  by  instinct, 
to  its  chosen  ‘ ‘ Third  Parties”;  these  it  finds  naturally 
among  the  Recommenders,  and  the  powers  they  repre¬ 
sent.  Prom  both  sides,  then,  that  of  society  and  that  of 
the  individual,  the  Recommender  is  an  agent  of  prog¬ 
ress  in  the  direction  of  realizing  our  postulate ;  and  so 
far  as  it  can  make  use  of  this  (free  and  unofficial) 
triadic  structure,  society  succeeds,  as  it  were,  in  lift¬ 
ing  itself  by  its  own  bootstraps.  The  ideals  under  which 


218 


SOCIETY 


men  perforce  live  thus  tend  to  approximate  the  ideals 
they  would  choose  for  themselves. 

3.  The  particular  advantage  gained  by  the  detach¬ 
ment  of  Eecommendership  is  the  correction  of  the 
interested  ideal:  but  like  every  advantage,  this  one 
also  is  bought  with  a  price;  and  society  needs  always 
to  be  saved  from  the  besetting  vice  of  its  Recom- 
menders,  that  of  abstraction.  Since  Aristotle  drew  his 
sharp-cut  pictures  of  the  philosopher  and  the  states¬ 
man  we  have  progressed  far  in  the  art  of  combining 
the  contrasting  careers  of  reflection  and  action;  but 
we  are  still  far  from  knowing  how  to  be  wholly  im¬ 
mersed  in  affairs  and  at  the  same  time  adequately  to 
reflect  upon  them.  Hence  we  need  protection  from  the 
abstract  ideal,  as  well  as  from  the  interested  ideal. 

Contemporary  consciousness  is  keenly  aware  of  this 
need.  We  see  that  by  the  circumstances  of  their  origin 
our  inherited  magazine  of  standards  is  likely  to  fit  the 
men  of  fiction  better  than  the  men  of  reality ;  and  there 
are  many  signs  of  the  inclination  to  attribute  the  diffi¬ 
culty  to  1  philosophy ’  or  to  ‘idealism/  when  it  is  simply 
the  difficulty  of  reflective  self-consciousness  every¬ 
where.  Biography  encounters  it  in  the  form  of  an  ap- 
parent  dilemma :  that  between  being,  on  the  one  hand, 
realistic  and  disappointing,  and  on  the  other,  abstractly 
heroic  and  unreal.  All  history,  all  art,  all  reflective 
description  of  mankind  encounters  it. 

One  of  the  class  faults  of  the  Recommender,  an  ex¬ 
pression  of  the  penchant  for  keen  and  sensitive  listen¬ 
ing  that  makes  him  useful,  is  an  over-valuation  of  the 


IDEALS  AND  THEIR  RECOMMENDERS  219 

aesthetic  elements  in  our  necessary  interests, — the 
unmixed,  the  clear,  the  simple,  the  orderly,  the  system¬ 
atic,  the  ‘pure.’3  Our  aversions  to  dirt  or  to  disorder 
are  not  profoundly  natural,  and  in  this  case  nature  may 
be  partly  right :  certainly  a  highly  successful  pattern- 
ism  and  purism  produce  distrust  by  their  very  clarity. 
Mature  worldly  wisdom  is  quick  to  detect  the  shop- 
product  of  Eecommendership ;  and  not  uncommonly  it 
adopts  an  indulgent  superiority  to  the  whole  business 
of  ‘  ideals/  as  a  necessary  hut  always  transitory  inci¬ 
dent  in  the  process  of  growing-up. 

But  there  is  a  natural  corrective  for  the  tyranny  of 
abstractions,  less  easy  than  this  superior  realism,  but 
more  honest.  It  is  found  in  the  circumstance  that  ab¬ 
stractions  breed  their  own  critics  in  opposing  abstrac¬ 
tions;  so  that  individual  judgment  is  summoned  to 
select  between  them  or  to  combine  them.  The  over¬ 
burdened  school  mistress  we  were  speaking  of  has,  no 
doubt,  an  abstract  ideal.  But  the  contrasting  ideals  of 
the  boys ’  gang,  administered  through  that  fear  of  being 
thought  afraid  which  makes  the  life  of  a  small  boy  with 
his  fellows  a  chronic,  if  subconscious,  hazing  party, — 
these  ideals  also,  with  all  their  flourish  of  substanti¬ 
ality,  are  abstract.  So,  too,  are  all  the  maturer  realisms 
abstract.  Whatever  common  sense  any  boy  or  man 
achieves  as  a  guide  of  his  life  must  be  won  by  compos¬ 
ing  for  himself  the  half-truths  of  his  opposing  abstract 
authorities.  And  in  this  process  of  composing,  he  will 

s  Sir  Henry  Maine ’s  attitude  toward  the  ideals  of  an  equity  based  on 
‘natural  law’  well  illustrates  the  revulsion  from  this  defect.  Ancient 
Law,  chs.  iii  and  iv. 


220 


SOCIETY 


be  guided  by  that  same  mental  after-image  which  di¬ 
rects  his  individual  experience.4 

4.  By  the  play  of  one  authority  against  another, 
authority  thus  sinks  to  its  rightful  place  as  an  element, 
a  necessary  element,  in  the  circuits  of  individual 
growth.  But  after  all,  what  assurance  have  we  that 
this  playing  with  authority  is  not  simply  a  compromise  ! 
For  the  sake  of  living  in  society,  I  bargain  away,  as  by 
an  implied  contract,  a  certain  amount  of  liberty,  that 
is  to  say,  of  myself.  Recommenders  help  to  make  the 
bargain  less  costly  for  me;  and  their  own  differences 
and  competitions  still  further  lower  the  price  of  the 
social  commodity.  But  is  not  the  transaction  at  its  best 
after  all  a  sale,  a  relinquishment  of  my  free  nature  ? 

In  fact,  we  have  not  shown  that  our  postulate  can  be 
complied  with;  that  any  real  identity  of  what  I  want 
and  what  others  want  of  me  can  be  reached.  The  missing 
link  in  the  logic,  however,  may  be  supplied;  and  per¬ 
haps  conveniently  by  considering  the  anatomy  of  ad¬ 
miration ,  from  which  sentiment  any  ideal  must  come. 

In  the  boy’s  desire  to  be  a  man,  amounting  at  times 
to  a  ruling  passion,  society  finds  the  need  upon  which 
many  a  hard  bargain  can  be  driven.  If  the  Spartan 
boy  thinks  that  to  be  a  man  involves  enduring  much 
pain  without  flinching,  no  theory  of  his  interest  will 
prevent  him  from  submitting  to  torture.  He  is  gov- 

4  It  is  in  such  situations  that  the  dialectic  of  experience,  at  first  of 
the  simple  Platonic  form,  tends  to  fall  into  the  Hegelian  pattern,  the 
opposing  Recommenders  standing  as  thesis  and  antithesis,  while  the  self 
undertakes  to  reinterpret  their  ideas  in  a  synthesis  of  its  own.  Many  of 
Hegel’s  triads  are  fair  formal  accounts  of  social  experience;  fewer  than 
he  thought  express  common  or  universal  experience. 


IDEALS  AND  THEIR  RECOMMENDERS  221 

erned  not  by  ideals  alone,  but  by  bis  concrete  admira¬ 
tions.  His  principle  might  be  stated:  What  I  admire 
in  others  I  wish  for  myself  (naturally  with  the  under¬ 
standing  that  what  man  has  done  man  can  do  again). 
It  is  logically  impossible  for  him  to  detach  his  thought 
of  himself  from  his  thought  of  others ;  because  in  every 
instance,  including  his  own,  consciousness  shows  him 
at  once  the  individual  and  the  type .  In  every  human 
event,  he  is  perceiving  man.  But  this  general  principle, 
that  what  one  admires  one  admires  universally,  applies 
also  to  the  admirations  of  others :  they  cannot  emanci¬ 
pate  their  admirations  from  their  experience.  Hence 
admiration  is  held  within  the  scope  of  the  possible ;  and 
it  tends  to  be  true  of  all  fundamental  values,  that  What 
others  admire ,  I  admire.  The  connection  with  our  postu¬ 
late  is  therewith  complete.  What  others  would  admire 
in  me  tends  to  agree  with  what  I  actually  admire  in 
them:  and  what  I  admire  in  them  I  must  admire  (and 
wish  for)  in  myself :  hence,  what  they  would  admire  in 
me,  I  must  wish  for  in  myself. 

It  is  true  that  admiration  is  capable  of  drinking  up 
much  sediment  with  its  cup,  imitation  being  the  most 
indiscriminate  of  all  human  proclivities.  It  is  also  true 
that  I  cease  in  time  to  hope  to  realize  in  myself  all  that 
I  admire.  I  find  that  I  can  be  neither  Lincoln,  nor 
Napoleon,  nor  Plato.  Yet  in  any  such  relinquishment, 
I  forgo  only  the  detail  and  the  degree;  I  persist  in 
demanding  of  myself  that  I  transplant  into  my  own 
work  and  upon  my  own  scale,  the  most  general  quality 
of  my  admiration.  For  at  bottom,  admiration  is  a  form 
of  appetite.  Men  can  only  admire  where  they  can  have 


222 


SOCIETY 


interest  and  possibility.  No  amount  of  recommendation 
can  make  the  ideals  of  mediaeval  art  an  object  {in  toto ) 
of  my  desire  for  myself :  no  hunger  of  mine  leans  that 
way.  The  individual  need  is  cared  for  by  the  spontane¬ 
ous  emphasis  of  his  admirations.  I  can  admire  what 
others  admire  only  so  far  as  I  do  in  reality  belong  to 
their  species  and  to  their  clan.  But  this  organic  basis 
of  desire  for  quality  is  perhaps  the  best  security  that 
the  authorities  within  one’s  own  age  and  society  will 
be  roughly  the  authorities  meeting  one’s  major  needs. 

In  many  simple  passes  of  daily  experience  we 
acknowledge  clearly  enough  that  the  social  eye  intrudes 
upon  our  own  more  private  life  not  to  alienate,  but 
to  recall  us  to  ourselves.  Imagine,  for  example,  that 
in  that  wild  place,  that  arena  in  which  primitive  motives 
are  free  to  appear  and  be  wrestled  with, — imagine,  I 
say,  that  in  the  family  circle  some  explosion  of  primi¬ 
tive  wrath  takes  place.  And  suppose  that  by  inadvert¬ 
ence  an  honored  guest  becomes  witness  of  the  scene. 
This  accidental  intrusion  of  the  disinterested  eye  is 
likely  to  come  not  as  a  disagreeable  reminder  of  a  false 
convention;  but  as  lending  new  vigor — through  the 
chagrin — to  certain  languishing  maxims  of  self-control 
which  personal  experience  in  the  dialectic  of  pugnacity 
had  already  suggested.  What  my  friend  wishes  me  to 
be,  and  what  I  would  appear  to  him  to  be,  is  without 
doubt  what  I  also  demand  for  myself.  In  this  instance, 
at  least,  I  am  recalled  to  my  own  freedom.  And  this  is 
the  natural  destiny  of  all  the  arrangements  by  which 
society  foists  ideals  upon  individual  lives. 


CHAPTER  XXVIII 


LAWS  AND  THE  STATE 

IN  the  making  of  ideals  there  is  no  necessary  com¬ 
promise  of  individual  welfare.  But  in  managing  the 
materials  of  existence,  some  compromise  is  inevitable. 
If  men  live  together  at  all,  especially  if  they  live  close 
together  like  trees  in  a  forest,  what  happens  to  the  trees 
will  necessarily  happen  to  the  men  also.  It  is  idle 
to  suppose  that  their  side  branches  can  reach  full 
development. 

The  total  burden  of  scarcity  in  room  and  wealth, 
society  in  political  form  usually  undertakes  to  dis¬ 
tribute.  Apart  from  political  rules  and  distinctions, 
men  usually  adopt  the  plan  of  equal  sharing  if  they 
wish  to  preserve  the  peace:  this  is  the  thought-saving 
justice  of  ‘ nature.’1  Social  rules  try  to  secure  first  the 
least  total  suffering,  and  then  proportionate  suffering 
according  to  some  usable  principle  of  distribution.  But 
all  laws,  rules,  understandings,  assume  some  suffering, 
— an  insufficiency  of  competitive  goods,  the  consequent 
existence  of  unsatisfied  instincts  and  imperfect  growth. 
In  this  respect,  then,  the  political  condition  obviously 

i  Hear  the  anthropologist  on  this  point :  ‘  ‘  Among  the  savages  of 
the  upper  Orinoco,  one  of  the  most  primitive  of  extant  peoples,  whatever 
eatable  is  discovered  by  one  of  a  pair  is  immediately  divided,  with  much 
care  for  equality  of  division,  though  there  is  no  political  authority 
among  them,  ’  *  etc. 


224 


SOCIETY 


takes  the  form  of  a  bargain  or  contract.  The  much 
maligned  ‘ 4 social  contract”  has  certainly  no  truth  as 
a  description  of  political  origins’ (and  was  never  so 
understood  by  its  more  distinguished  expounders) ; 
but  as  a  formal  expression  for  a  natural  preference 
it  is  an  entirely  valid  way  of  stating  the  case.  Better 
is  partial  hunger  “and  quietness  therewith”  than  the 
slim  chance  of  a  full  stomach  with  hostility  to  all 
neighbors.  Security,  peace,  and  their  corollary,  “a 
calculable  future,”  are  worth  to  most  men  the  sacrifice 
of  the  fighter’s  chance  together  with  the  privilege  of 
free  fighting  itself :  and  this,  to  Hobbes,  is  the  essential 
preference  which  sanctions  the  political  state.  This 
is,  indeed,  no  adequate  account  of  the  two  sides  of  the 
bargain.  The  insurance  aspect  of  social  order  has 
been  overdone  in  all  these  contract  formulae;  and  is 
still  overdone  in  contemporary  theories  of  the  State.2 
The  growth  of  cities  shows,  among  other  things,  that 
to  most  men  the  hazard  of  a  large  gain  is  still  more 
attractive  than  the  assurance  of  a  little;  and  the 
weight  of  preference  for  unsalaried  over  salaried  occu¬ 
pations  suggests  as  much.  To  all  that  Hobbes  sees  of 
value  in  the  civil  condition,  we  must  at  least  add  the 
disinterested  satisfaction  of  social  instincts  and  of  the 
insistent  hunger  for  self-knowledge.  But  whatever  the 
terms  of  the  exchange,  the  truth  remains  that  we  must 
surrender  something  for  the  sake  of  being  social;  and 

2  As  in  Bagehot’s  phrase  just  quoted,  “a  calculable  future”;  or 
Boyce,  War  and  Insurance ;  or  J.  Kohler,  Philosophy  of  Law ,  “It  is 
necessary  for  the  progress  of  culture  that  chance  be  conquered”  (p. 
28).  The  conquest  of  chance  is  an  important,  but  by  no  means  the 
primary,  value  of  social  order. 


LAWS  AND  THE  STATE 


225 


so,  in  spite  of  the  high  polemic  against  the  historical 
reality  and  the  legal  status  of  a  social  contract,  no  one 
really  questions  the  psychological  truth  of  its  central 
idea.3  The  question  is  always  pertinent:  “What  is  the 
cost  of  organized  society  to  its  members ?”  and  “Is 
such  society  worth  the  cost  ? ’  ’ 

I 

For  our  purposes  it  is  necessary  to  estimate  this 
cost  not  in  terms  of  pleasure  and  pain,  as  particular 
satisfactions,  but  in  terms  of  instinct  and  will  and 
their  full  development. 

To  Hobbes  it  seemed  evident  that  our  instincts  are 
doomed  to  be  seriously  hampered,  inasmuch  as  “the 
laws  of  Nature,  as  ‘ justice, ’  ‘equity,’  ‘modesty,’ 
‘mercy,’  and  in  sum  ‘doing  to  others  as  we  would  be 
done  to’  .  .  .  are  contrary  to  our  natural  passions, 
that  carry  us  to  partiality,  pride,  revenge  and  the 
like.”4  Here  our  study  of  the  dialectic  of  pugnacity 
comes  to  hand:  we  can  state  that  “our  natural  pas¬ 
sions”  of  their  own  motion  carry  us  well  beyond  re¬ 
venge,  and  well  into  the  region  of  justice,  equity,  and 
even  of  mercy.  This  dialectic  presupposes  continuous 
social  experience,  and  would  not  take  place  apart  from 

3  The  discussion  of  the  social  contract  theory  from  Hume  to  the 
present  is  one  of  the  least  creditable  chapters  in  modern  scholarship. 
It  illustrates  too  often  how  seekers  of  Truth  can  “darken  counsel’ ’  by 
stooping  to  refute  a  position  defined  by  themselves  only.  This  is  much 
easier  than  attempting  to  discover  what  the  opponent  actually  meant. 
Even  Kohler,  who  is  everywhere  substantial  and  wise,  has  allowed  himself 
to  nod  on  this  matter  ( Philosophy  of  Law,  p.  10,  Eng.  tr.). 

4  Leviathan,  ch.  xvii. 


226 


SOCIETY 


social  order;  but  the  point  is,  that  given  the  social 
order,  such  modifications  of  behavior  involve  no  cur¬ 
tailment  of  individual  growth.  The  same  is  true  of 
many  other  repressions  that  begin  from  the  outside, 
and  become  adopted  into  the  individual  constitution. 
Could  we  examine  here  the  dialectic  of  each  several 
instinct  we  should  find  that  none  come  from  their  social- 
legal  baptism  unaltered,  or  untaught .  In  general,  law, 
which  at  first  is  contrary  to  the  state  of  a  person  ’s  will, 
brings  about  the  state  of  mind  which  justifies  the  law. 
In  Rousseau’s  judgment,  it  is  at  least  possible  that 
every  human  impulse  should  submit  to  its  social  com¬ 
pression,  be  “yielded  up  to  the  general  will,”  and  yet 
the  individual  ‘  ‘  still  obey  himself  alone,  and  remain  as 
free  as  before.”  And  to  Hegel,  the  action  of  society  is 
so  fundamentally  informing  and  liberating,  that  social 
mutilation  is  not  so  much  as  considered.  Laws  and  in¬ 
stitutions  act  purely  to  interpret  to  each  member  of  the 
State  his  own  deeper  will. 

But  the  rosy  views  of  Rousseau  and  Hegel  seem  as 
excessive  on  one  side  as  the  more  savage  views  of 
Hobbes  on  the  other.  While  to  Hobbes  every  social  re¬ 
pression  is  a  pure  loss,  a  necessary  tax  on  natural 
liberty,  and  none  an  ingredient  of  my  own  will,  for 
Hegel  every  such  repression  is  a  part  of  my  will,  and 
none  a  pure  loss.  This  latter  position  seems  rather  to 
describe  an  ideal  than  an  actual  or  possible  social  state. 
If  every  privation  incident  to  orderly  social  life,  in¬ 
cluding  the  loss  of  the  liberty  either  to  judge  or  to 
avenge  my  own  injuries, — if  every  such  privation  were 
just  what  I,  with  full  insight,  would  freely  impose  upon 


LAWS  AND  THE  STATE 


227 


myself  for  the  sake  of  more  inclusive  and  significant 
ends,  it  would  mean,  would  it  not,  that  all  competitive 
relations  in  society  had  been  transformed  or  absorbed 
into  non-competitive  relations?  In  so  far,  for  example, 
as  the  scramble  for  food  becomes  an  incident  of  a  wholly 
non-competitive  interest  in  improving  industrial  tech¬ 
nique,  I  can  truly  say  that  social  necessities  are  minis¬ 
tering  to  the  freedom  of  my  own  major  desires  and  for 
so  much  of  a  spur  I  may  be  grateful.  The  criterion, 
then,  of  an  entirely  free  social  existence  would  be  (and 
this  we  shall  call  our  second  postulate) : 

Every  competitive  interest  must  be  so  trans¬ 
formed  or  interpreted  as  to  be  non-competi¬ 
tive,  or  an  ingredient  in  a  non-competitive 
interest. 

And  we  must  enquire,  as  before,  how  far  social  ar¬ 
rangements  facilitate,  or  make  possible,  the  meeting 
of  this  demand. 


II 

In  the  large  we  may  say  that  the  primary  economic 
needs,  those  for  food,  shelter,  etc.,  are  competitive  and 
always  will  be  competitive;  because  the  material  ob¬ 
jects  which  they  require  exist  in  limited  quantities  as 
compared  with  the  demand,  especially  when  quality  is 
taken  into  account. 

On  the  other  hand,  what  we  have  called  our  neces¬ 
sary  interests  are  normally  non-competitive.  When 
you  satisfy  your  interest  in  unity  or  rhythm  or  order 
you  help  to  satisfy  my  interest  in  these  same  objects. 


228 


SOCIETY 


For  these  objects  are  neither  limited  in  quantity  nor 
are  they  capable  of  being  made  private  possession  in 
snch  wise  that  the  more  yon  have  the  less  there  is  left 
for  me.  In  adding  to  yonr  own  wealth  in  these  goods, 
you  add  to  a  common  fund.  Taking  the  ‘will  to  live’ 
as  a  typical  necessary  interest,  it  is  true  that  there  are 
conceivable  situations  in  which  it  is  “Either  your  life 
or  mine,” — chiefly  situations  in  which  life  hangs  on 
some  physical  condition.  But  when  I  regard  life  as  a 
human  life,  i.e.,  as  a  process  of  thought,  a  constant 
exchange  of  ideas  and  appreciations,  the  disjunction, 
‘  ‘  Either  your  life  or  mine,  ’  ’  becomes  absurd :  I  can  have 
no  such  life  unless  you  are  there,  and  the  more  you 
have,  the  more  I  have  also.  With  such  goods  all  prop¬ 
erty  runs  to  a  common  fund;  and  in  all  exchange  both 
parties  gain  without  losing. 

Necessary  interests  may  appear  to  be  competitive  if 
made  to  simulate  the  economic  pattern,  as  when  one 
claims  a  monopoly  of  an  idea,  and  patents  it.  And  there 
are  simple  devices  whereby  economic  needs  are  made  to 
appear  non-competitive.  They  are  arrangements  for 
simulating  the  common  fund  and  the  process  of  ex¬ 
change  which  are  characteristic  of  the  non-competitive 
interest.  If  we  oblige  each  member  of  a  group  to  get 
what  he  wants,  not  directly,  but  by  way  of  a  common 
fund,  it  is  evident  that  he  will  be  concerned  to  add  as 
much  as  possible  to  this  common  fund,  and  so  seem  to 
have  common  cause  with  all  the  rest.  And  if  we  oblige 
members  to  pursue  different  tasks,  so  that  each  can  get 
what  he  wants  only  by  trading  with  somebody  else,  it 
is  evident  that  each  will  be  concerned  to  produce  as 


LAWS  AND  THE  STATE 


229 


much  as  possible  for  the  use  of  the  rest.  But  it  is  clear 
that  these  indirect  methods  of  getting  are  artificial  and 
must  be  enforced :  they  conceal  but  do  not  alter  the  com¬ 
petitive  nature  of  the  underlying  interest. 

But  social  life  must  always  be  a  union  of  both  types 
of  interest.  And  the  union  is  to  this  extent  inseparable, 
that  there  are  no  interests,  however  general,  which  do 
not  require  the  private  and  exclusive  use  of  some  ma¬ 
terial  objects,  and  so  far  take  on  the  economic  type. 
The  will  to  power  will  thus  have  competitive  and  non¬ 
competitive  ingredients.  And  the  fate  of  our  second 
postulate  will  depend  upon  whether  these  competitive 
ingredients  can  be  subordinated  to  the  non-competitive 
ingredients. 

6  6  Power/ y  as  Hobbes  has  accurately  pointed  out, 
quickly  becomes  the  representative  object  of  pursuit, 
as  a  symbol  for  all  economic  goods.  Instead  of  working 
for  them,  we  work  first  for  power  (or  for  wealth,  as  its 
measure)  as  a  means  to  them;  then  as  an  end  in  itself. 
In  spite  of  the  contumely  heaped  upon  the  stock 
“miser,”  this  is  a  valuable  transformation  of  crude 
instinct.  “In  itself,”  says  Kohler,  “the  instinct  for 
food  is  brutal.  .  .  .  This  state  of  things  does  not  change 
until  the  instinct  for  food  is  ennobled  by  becoming  the 
instinct  for  wealth,  and  a  certain  system  and  order 
enter  into  the  acquisition  of  material  goods.  ’  ’5  But  this 
transformation  still  leaves  the  competitive  quality  dom¬ 
inant.  Non-competitive  relations  are  but  simulated, 
as  in  the  directer  strife  for  existence.  I  can  gain  power 


5  Philosophy  of  Law ,  p.  46. 


230 


SOCIETY 


over  a  fish  only  by  first  offering  it  a  service;  but  the 
tender  of  a  meal  to  the  fish  is  not  an  accurate  index  to 
my  ultimate  purpose.  In  human  society  as  well,  power  is 
best  gained  indirectly,  through  proffers  of  service :  you 
control  me,  for  the  most  part,  only  by  controlling  what 
I  want,  or  think  I  want.  But  the  phrase  4  ‘  Ich  dien  ’  ’  only 
names  the  indirect  route  through  which  you  mount  to 
ascendency. 

Such  power,  in  fact,  is  more  essentially  and  more 
unremittingly  competitive  than  any  other  motive,  be¬ 
cause  while  it  is  always  finite  in  amount,  it  has  no 
quantitative  maximum.  However  much  I  have,  another 
may  have  more;  and  indeed  the  best  way  for  him  to 
get  more,  if  I  have  much,  is  by  controlling  me.  Could 
he  but  be  sure  of  this  control,  he  would  have  every 
interest  to  add  to  my  own  power ;  the  greater  my  power, 
the  greater  his, — just  as  the  greater  the  power  of  a 
tool  or  machine,  the  greater  the  power  of  the  owner. 
Thus  the  simulated  identity  of  interests  might  come  as 
close  as  you  please  to  an  actual  identity  in  appearance, 
while  remaining  as  far  as  possible  from  identity  in 
actual  motive. 

And  it  is  just  at  this  point,  as  the  quest  of  competi¬ 
tive  power  grows  without  limit,  that  the  simulated 
identity  may  become  an  actual  identity,  and  take  on  a 
genuine  non-competitive  character.  For  clearly  the  only 
way  in  which  a  finite  being  can  ride  to  infinite  or  un¬ 
limited  power  is  by  finding  that  power  in  another  being, 
or  an  unlimited  number  of  others  like  himself ;  and  the 
only  way  in  which  such  an  unlimited  number  of  others 
can  be  brought  under  his  control,  is  that  they  shall 


LAWS  AND  THE  STATE 


231 


freely  come  under  it  because  he  can  actually  serve  them. 
And  the  only  way  in  which  he  can  serve  an  unlimited 
number  of  others  is  by  providing  them  something  un¬ 
limited  in  space  and  time,  something  of  the  nature  of 
idea  rather  than  of  matter  for  consumption.  One  must 
perforce  enter  the  field  of  necessary  interests,  and  of 
funds  naturallv  common,  in  order  to  win  an  infinite 
ascendency.  But  in  entering  this  field,  not  only  does 
his  own  power  become  potentially  infinite,  but  so  also 
does  the  power  of  every  other. 

For  every  man  has  an  idea,  a  view  of  things,  which 
distinguishes  him  by  birth  from  every  other  person; 
and  the  value  of  that  idea,  or  i  point  of  view, 9  to  others 
is  his  chief  excuse  for  existence  as  a  human  being.  And 
while  the  work  and  thought  of  every  man  do  in  fact 
leave  so  much  less  for  other  men  to  do,  the  sum  of 
things  to  be  thought  and  done  remains  infinite,  so  that 
there  can  be  no  competition  for  new  ideas.  It  is  rare 
indeed  that  the  workers  in  ideas  so  much  as  fancy  that 
another  has  usurped  their  territory  and  stolen  away 
their  crown ;  but  if  they  fancy  this,  it  is  because  they 
have  not  yet  discovered  their  own  territory.  In  terms 
of  his  idea,  the  power  of  each  individual  is  potentially 
infinite,  and  non-competitive. 

The  total  accumulated  power  of  mankind  in  terms  of 
i ideas  ’  (under  which  head  we  include  conceptions  of 
beauty  and  of  utility  and  technique  as  well  as  of  scien¬ 
tific  law  and  psychological  insight)  we  call  (now  some¬ 
what  diffidently)  “culture.”  Any  idea  which  you  or  I 
may  have  wins  its  control  by  entering  into  this  growing 
body.  And  the  exercise  of  any  such  power  is  instantly 


232 


SOCIETY 


reciprocal.  For  to  say  that  your  idea  controls  me,  and 
to  say  that  I  control  your  idea,  are  hut  two  ways  of 
saying  the  same  thing.  Your  power  is  identically  mine. 
Thus,  so  far  as  a  substantial  and  living  culture  exists, 
the  will  to  power  of  any  individual  may  take  on  a  non¬ 
competitive  meaning. 


Ill 

But ‘  ‘  culture  ’ ’  does  not  exist  by  spontaneous  genera¬ 
tion,  any  more  than  history — the  mental  continuity  and 
totality  of  men — exists  by  itself.  Non-competitive  in¬ 
terests  of  course  exist  in  some  measure  wherever  two 
or  three  are  gathered  together.  But  if  we  seek  for  a 
non-competitive  form  of  power  which  shall  be  sub¬ 
stantial  and  compelling  enough  to  take  up  into  itself 
all  the  competitive  forms  as  subordinate  ingredients, 
we  can  only  find  it  if  history  and  culture  are  created, 
that  is  to  say,  if  by  some  positive  effort  the  race  is 
mentally  held  together.  It  is  this  necessity  which  pro¬ 
duces  the  political  State.  The  State  is  the  objective  con¬ 
dition  through  which  a  non-competitive  satisfaction  of 
the  will  to  power  becomes  possible.  The  State  is  the 
condition  under  which  alone  our  second  postulate  can 
be  satisfied.  It  is  no  psychological  accident,  therefore, 
that  the  first  business  of  the  will  to  power  in  the  order 
of  time  has  been  the  creation  of  political  rule,  and  there¬ 
with  of  history  and  culture.  By  that  deed,  however 
violent,  the  crasser  and  competitive  forms  of  this  will 
have  paved  the  way  for  their  own  subjugation  under 
the  more  human  forms. 


LAWS  AND  THE  STATE  233 

It  is  not  altogether  surprising  that  men  have  been 
somewhat  mystified  at  the  degree  of  importance  which 
they  themselves  have  ascribed  to  political  entities ;  nor 
that,  becoming  critical,  they  have  often  adopted,  as 
Tolstoy,  skeptical  or  anarchistic  conclusions.  For  the 
deepest  needs  are  the  last  to  become  completely  self- 
conscious;  and  States  have  satisfied  needs  far  deeper 
than  the  conscious  purposes  of  their  founders,  which 
have  apparently  been  for  the  most  part  of  the  com¬ 
petitive  type,  far  deeper,  too,  than  any  economic  in¬ 
terest.  The  dialectic  of  the  will  might  not,  of  itself, 
have  led  to  the  creation  of  the  State ;  for  the  State  must 
appear  as  a  fact  to  many  minds  at  once,  and  not  as  a 
discovery  of  individual  experience.  But  the  State  hav¬ 
ing  been  made,  the  human  will  can  recognize  it  as  that 
which  it  does  in  fact  want:  this  subconscious  recogni¬ 
tion  is  the  feeling  of  patriotism.  It  is  the  perception 
of  necessary  discontent  with  all  ephemeral  satisfac¬ 
tions,  of  the  hunger  for  a  permanent  effect,  and  of  the 

truth  that  the  value  of  anv  human  effect  is  measured 

%/ 

by  the  dignity  and  scope  of  the  tradition  in  which  it 
lodges.  Of  themselves  as  units,  men  could  not  create, 
but  only  receive  such  a  tradition :  history  and  a  culture 
are  objects  which  no  human  being  and  no  simultaneous 
group  of  human  beings  can  manufacture  at  will.  Yet 
without  them,  their  own  worth  sinks  below  the  human 
level.  It  is  for  this  reason,  whether  they  have  known  it 
or  not,  that  they  have  placed  the  value  of  the  existence 
of  the  State  above  the  value  of  their  own  personal  exist¬ 
ence.  To  offer  one ’s  life  for  the  State  is  simply  to  make 
the  existence  of  the  State  one’s  first  earthly  business; 


234 


SOCIETY 


it  is  to  take  part,  whether  early  or  late,  in  the  founda¬ 
tion  of  the  political  entity,  without  which  no  man ’s  will 
to  power  can  find  fully  human  satisfaction. 

Thus  all  men  require  the  State ,  as  a  Third  Being, 
whose  power  is  their  power,  whose  immortality  is  their 
immortality,  whose  total  mind  and  appreciation  is 
theirs,  and  of  their  works.  It  is  only  through  the  exist¬ 
ence  of  such  a  Being  that  Weltgeschichte  can  in  any 
measure  become  das  Weltgericlit.  It  is  only  through  its 
existence  that  the  race  can  come  to  complete  self- 
knowledge,  and  individuals  to  their  own  through  the 
self-knowledge  of  the  race.  It  is  not  the  will  to  power 
alone,  but  every  instinct,  that  apart  from  the  social 
order  finds  itself  bewildered,  not  free.  Its  controlling 
canopy  of  meaning  is  feeble.  Habits  cannot  take  root 
and  give  way  to  habits  better  interpreting  it.  In  any 
community,  instinct  may  find  itself  opposed  to  custom 
and  law ;  but  it  still  perceives  its  own  meaning,  perhaps 
the  clearer  because  of  the  opposition.  Destroy,  how¬ 
ever,  the  custom,  the  permanence,  the  regularity,  the 
social  requirement,  the  force  of  the  authoritative 
dictum,  ‘ 6  This  is  what  you  want  and  mean, 9  ’ — destroy 
these,  and  instinct  gropes  in  emptiness,  condemned  to 
many  futile  hypotheses.  In  a  choice  of  evils,  it  is  better 
to  know  yourself  at  odds  with  your  social  order  than 
not  to  know  yourself  at  all. 

The  State,  I  say,  is  required  by  all  men,  as  a  neces¬ 
sary  object  for  the  will  to  power,  and  therewith  for 
every  instinct.  It  is  the  feeling  of  this  necessity  and 
its  logic,  I  take  it,  which  makes  man  the  zoon  politikon: 
this  is  the  anatomy  of  his  so-called  political  instinct. 


LAWS  AND  THE  STATE  >  235  \ 

I  do  not  say  that  the  State,  and  certainly  not  any 
specific  State,  is  a  sufficient  condition  for  such  satis¬ 
faction.  For  there  are  States  enough  which  neither 
welcome  ideas  nor  admit  the  logic  of  non-competitive 
power.  It  is  the  necessity,  not  the  sufficiency,  of  the 
State  which  I  assert ;  and  thus  a  necessary  preference 
for  life  within  a  State  rather  than  apart  from  a  State. 

And  since  a  preference  which  is  necessary  is  unani¬ 
mous,  we  may  translate  the  psychological  necessity, 
if  we  like,  into  a  unanimity  of  decision,  whether  self¬ 
consciously  understood  and  admitted  or  not.  And  here¬ 
with  we  have  the  answer  to  the  fundamental  question 
of  the  social  contract.  All  men  must  prefer  the  State ; 
all  men  are  consenting  to  the  existence  of  the  State. 
And  the  primary  unanimity  necessary  to  the  sanction 
of  any  majority  is  thus  established. 

IY 

The  existence  of  the  State  allows  the  competitive 
form  of  the  will  to  power  to  assume  non-competitive 
shape.  And  through  this  fact  the  transformation  of 
the  more  special  desires  from  the  competitive  to  non¬ 
competitive  forms  may  begin.  The  economic  struggle 
for  existence,  and  for  better  existence,  becomes  sub¬ 
ordinated  to  what  is  now,  not  merely  as  a  pious  wish 
but  actually,  of  common  concern,  and  is  interpreted  by 
it.  Thus  the  division  of  labor  and  the  process  of  mutu¬ 
ally  gainful  exchange  cease  to  be  purely  mechanical 
advantages  with  egoistic  background ;  they  become  an 
opportunity  for  individuality  and  unique  talent  and 


236 


SOCIETY 


for  thought-filled  loyalties  (Durkheim).6  Competition 
is  not  abolished :  it  cannot  be  dispensed  with,  even  as 
an  instrument  of  my  necessary  interests  in  self-knowl¬ 
edge  and  self -measurement.  But  if  in  any  contest  for 
material  goods,  I  fail,  while  you  gain,  it  now  becomes 
possible  for  me  to  say,  with  some  degree  of  sincerity, 
4 ‘I  will  this  result,”  on  the  same  principle  that  a  sports¬ 
man,  while  preferring  the  success  of  his  own  side,  may 
still  wish,  on  the  whole,  that  the  best  side  should  win. 
The  only  condition  under  which  he  or  I  can  define  our 
wish  in  this  way  is  that  the  dispelling  of  illusions  has 
become  significant :  there  are  real  powers  to  be  gained, 
and  in  order  to  gain  a  real  power,  I  can  heartily  wish 
the  destruction  of  all  power  of  mine  that  is  accidental 
and  false.  And  whatever  I  gain  through  any  such  sys¬ 
tem  will  have  a  value  beyond  the  fact  that  it  satisfies 
an  economic  need ;  because  it  comes  as  a  recognition  of 
my  validity,  of  my  being  on  the  right  track,  of  the 
common  consent  to  my  enjoyment:  it  is  interpreted  in 
terms  of  my  non-competitive  will  to  power.7 

6  The  polyhedral  limitation  of  man  by  neighboring  men  has  long  been 
recognized  as  the  condition  in  which  the  awareness  of  his  ethical  qualities 
best  springs  up.  1 1  Remember,  ’  ’  said  the  Stoic  to  himself  when  jostled 
in  the  crowd,  ‘ 1  Remember  what  it  is  that  you  want.  At  such  price  is 
sold  your  freedom  from  perturbation.  ’  ’  Remember,  we  might  add,  in 
the  pinch  of  specialization,  at  this  cost  must  be  sold  your  own  knowledge 
of  your  destiny.  Here  again,  the  law  brings  about  the  situation  that 
justifies  it,  the  distribution  of  tasks  out  of  which  contract  can  arise  as 
an  expression  of  personal  freedom.  “For  human  civilization  is  only 
conceivable  if  there  is  a  system  among  mankind  that  assigns  each  man 
his  part  and  sets  him  his  task.  ”  Kohler,  Philosophy  of  Law.  p.  4, 
Eng.  tr.  In  America  we  might  have  written,  “a  system  which  incites 
every  man  to  find  his  part  and  to  take  up  his  task.” 

7  In  this  way  I  should  express  Hegel ’s  meaning,  in  placing  the  stage 
of  “Contract”  in  his  system  of  right  beyond  the  stage  of  “Property.” 


LAWS  AND  THE  STATE 


237 


Such  transformation,  however,  would  he  gradual  in 
an  ideal  State, — still  more  so  in  any  actual  State, 
where  the  results  of  competition  are  still  governed  by 
many  factors  irrelevant  to  personal  worth.  Where  the 
game  retains  the  general  character  of  ‘  ‘  grab, ’  9  competi¬ 
tion  will  keep  its  predominantly  exclusive  quality  and 
its  primitive  meaning :  my  gain  is  your  loss.  Hence  the 
deformity  of  human  nature  in  the  State  is  not  a  myth : 
w~e  can  only  say  that  it  would  be  still  more  deformed 
apart  from  it,  and  only  by  its  aid  can  it  become  less 
deformed. 


CHAPTER  XXIX 


INSTITUTIONS  AND  CHANGE 

IDEALS  and  laws  are  fragments  of  institutions: 

institutions  are  permanent  clusters  of  ideals,  cus¬ 
toms,  laws.  An  institution,  like  the  law,  has  to  meet 
two  needs  and  not  one  only :  it  must  be  serviceable  to 
society ;  it  must  also  inform  a  groping  individual  what, 
according  to  racial  experience  or  national  experience, 
he  wants,  and  hold  him  to  that  meaning.  The  institu¬ 
tion  of  property  must  make  clear  to  him  the  completer 
sense  of  his  acquisitive  and  grabbing  instincts.  The 
institution  of  the  family  must  interpret  to  him  his  in¬ 
stincts  of  sex  and  parenthood.  Individuals  do  not  al¬ 
ways  take  kindly  to  the  discipline  of  the  institution, 
any  more  than  to  other  discipline ;  nevertheless,  when 
the  postulates  we  have  set  up  are  complied  with,  the 
hardships  of  this  discipline  have  a  meaning:  they  are 
part  of  the  normal  remaking  of  man. 

But  the  postulates  are  never  complied  with.  The 
specific  social  arrangements  we  have  described  which 
tend  to  hold  our  institutions  to  their  rightful  purpose 
are  but  partially  successful.  We  cannot  say  that  social 
strains  as  we  find  them  are  pre-eminently  informing 
and  full  of  meaning.  If  it  should  be  whispered  of  our 
institution  of  property  that  the  results  of  competition 
and  its  hardships  are  largely  without  human  signifi¬ 
cance,  I  should  not  know  how  to  refute  such  a  judg- 


INSTITUTIONS  AND  CHANGE 


239 


ment.  Hegel  was  never  truer  or  more  illuminating  than 
when  he  said  that  property  and  contract  are  essential 
ingredients  in  development  of  personality.  Yet  Hegel 
was  surely  a  false  prophet  when  he  said  that  person¬ 
ality  has  no  interest  in  the  quantity  of  property  a  man 
has,  its  only  concern  being  in  the  fact  of  having  some 
property.1  As  long  as  opportunity  lurks  in  spots  and 
is  given  chiefly  to  him  that  hath,  as  long  as  there  are 
dearths  of  common  mental  food  if  not  of  other  food; 

t, 

as  long  as  barrenness  and  absence  of  beauty  and  the 
burning  out  of  health  destroy  spiritual  hunger  itself; 
as  long  as  man  power  can  be  reckoned  as  horse  power, 
intellects  and  loyalties  flung  into  the  hopper  as  trade 
assets,  and  women  and  children  weighed  in  the  scales 
of  their  present  efficiency  without  regard  to  any  future, 
not  to  say  sacred  or  immortal  possibilities, — so  long 
personality  has  a  stake  in  the  amount  of  property  one 
has  and  not  in  the  fact  only.  And  one  who  calls  for 
*  discipline, 9  in  the  sense  of  a  hearty  ‘  ‘  I  accept  the  social 
universe”  and  its  rules,  may  find  himself  deservedly 
crying  in  the  wilderness,  if  he  blinks  such  residual  de¬ 
formations  of  the  social  order.  Social  unrest  and  un¬ 
discipline  are  founded  on  something  more  than  untidi¬ 
ness  of  mind ;  they  are  built  upon  a  belief  that  what  has 
to  be  done  would  best  be  done  by  rebellion,  overt  or 
syndicalized. 

w 

But  the  worst  enemy  of  a  real  grievance  has  always 
been  the  sham  grievance;  and  the  important  thing  is 

i  Bechtsphilosophie,  $  49.  The  whole  attempt  to  eliminate  quantity 
from  the  realm  of  spirit,  in  which  Bergson  is  at  one  with  Hegel,  seems 
to  me  unequivocally  mistaken. 


240 


SOCIETY 


to  aim  our  shaft  at  the  right  target.  We  dare  not  assert 
that  these  residual  deformations  are  wholly  without 
meaning  for  the  freedom  of  human  nature.  It  is  a  curi¬ 
ously  distorted  and  unreal  picture  of  human  instinct 
that  appears  when  we  imagine  each  craving  satisfied 
as  it  arises.  Though  such  Utopias  have  often  been  tried, 
and  are  the  food  and  drink  of  our  superficial  rebellious¬ 
ness,  the  thing  is — I  do  not  say  practically,  but  intrin¬ 
sically — impossible.  I  venture  the  statement  that  the 
chief  evil  of  most  of  our  social  hardships  is  not  that 
they  exist,  but  that  they  persist  beyond  their  time.  They 
play  their  part  in  a  process  which  elicits  the  most 
subtle  and  most  characteristic  aspects  of  human 
nature ;  we  can  only  estimate  this  nature  rightly  if  we 
grasp  this  process  in  its  entirety. 

I 

A  satisfied  man  is  certainly  a  man  whose  instincts 
are  satisfied ;  but  yet  we  cannot  satisfy  a  man  by  satis¬ 
fying  his  instincts  in  their  severalty.  History  is  an 
immense  laboratory  for  this  experiment.  The  cushion¬ 
ing  of  human  nature  is  always  proceeding  apace,  ac¬ 
cording  to  the  means  and  inventiveness  of  a  social 
order.  It  is  accelerated  by  the  high  premiums  paid  to 
one  who  finds  new  ways  to  minister  to  old  wants,  or 
who  finds  new  wants  to  cater  to.  Whoever  remedies  a 
bump  in  the  cushion,  or  what  is  as  bad,  a  point  of  non¬ 
support,  is  made  wealthy;  and  his  device  swiftly  runs 
the  gamut  from  luxury  to  necessity.  Thus  the  self-con¬ 
sciousness  of  all  tends  to  the  level  of  the  most  epi¬ 
curean  (though  there  is  always  a  privileged  region  of 


INSTITUTIONS  AND  CHANGE 


241 


society  which  receives  first  aid  in  this  elimination  of 
discomfort).  The  history  of  all  this  careful  study  of 
ease  is  everywhere  the  same :  the  more  our  satisfac¬ 
tions,  the  less  we  are  satisfied. 

Accordingly  there  is  everywhere  a  contemporary 
criticism  of  the  results  of  this  “  progress/ ’  a  criticism 
taking  many  forms, — often  of  ascetic  practice  and 
moralizing,  or  of  a  pessimistic  denunciation  of  life 
itself  as  an  embodied  illusion,  a  cosmic  hoax.  Or  an¬ 
other  alternative  dominates:  the  active  satisfactions 
of  instinct  are  set  up  at  odds  with  the  enjoying  end;2 
a  gospel  of  active  rather  than  passive  self-sacrifice  is 
preached,  a  gospel  of  work  or  of  heroic  U  ebermensch- 
lichkeit,  a  call  for  the  strenuous  life,  for  ‘energisin’ 
rather  than  hedonism,  or  even  a  clamor  for  war  itself 
as  an  opportunity  for  venting  the  energies  of  men.  The 
suggestions  are  many ;  but  for  us,  one  inference  is  clear. 

The  human  being  is  adapted  to  maladaptation.  This 
is  perhaps  his  supreme  point  of  fitness  to  survive  on 
this  planet.  We  are  better  fitted  to  walk  over  rough  and 
rolling  country  than  over  the  dead  level  of  city  pave¬ 
ments;  a  day’s  continuous  marching  over  this  artifi¬ 
cially  ‘ adapted’  footing  leaves  us  with  a  greater  fatigue 
than  a  day’s  tramp  across  country.  Endurance  and 
patience  are  not  in  the  first  instance  Christian  virtues, 
or  even  virtues  at  all:  they  are  biological  qualities 
(closely  related  to  the  ‘ delayed  response’),  fitting  us 
for  dealing  with  the  unfit.  A  dog  can  hold  for  a  long 
time  the  memory  of  an  injury,  cherishing  without  loss 
the  unappeased  impulse  of  revenge.  What  is  sporadic 

2  As  in  Holt,  The  Freudian  Wish,  p.  132,  etc. 


242 


SOCIETY 


in  the  dog,  is  distinguished  in  man,  and  applies  to  all 
his  major  passions.  Man  is  the  animal  that  can  wait, 
the  animal  fashioned  for  suspended  satisfaction.  This 
power  makes  it  possible  for  him  to  live  in  an  uncomfort¬ 
able  situation  while  deliberately  surveying  it,  and  select¬ 
ing  the  thrust  most  fitted  to  remove  it.  The  extent  of  this 
power  makes  him  in  effect  a  divided  being,  who  enjoys 
in  the  present  knowing  his  enjoyment  to  he  partial, 
while  harboring  a  larger  hunger,  destined  to  indefinite 
deferment,  yet  identified  most  closely  with  himself  and 
hence  not  suffered  to  decline.3  The  man  is  to  be  found 
in  his  Sehnsucht,  his  longing  or  yearning,  rather  than 
in  his  accomplished  ends.  Were  it  not  for  this  capacity 
to  retain  wholeness  of  prospect  in  the  midst  of  very 
fragmentary  satisfaction  (aided  by  a  large  power  for 
vicarious  enjoyment),  it  is  hardly  conceivable  that  we 
could  tolerate,  still  less  take  as  a  matter  of  course,  the 
actual  suppressions  of  talent  suffered  in  the  ordinary 
specialization  of  activity,  or  even  in  the  necessity 
(suffered  by  man  alone)  of  choosing  among  many 
possibilities  of  action  merely  because  the  narrow  time 
channel  is  overcrowded  with  our  plans.  No  being  is 
so  domiciled  in  mutilations  as  man.  Whatever  shape 
institutions  must  take  to  give  completest  vent  to  the 
possibilities  of  his  nature,  it  would  certainly  not  be 
a  shape  which  allowed  him  nothing  to  criticise  or  to 
reform.  His  fitness  for  the  unfit  must  have  its  scope. 

II 

A  completer  view  of  the  meaning  of  this  paradox 

3  See  Brown’s  poem,  The  Boman  Women. 


INSTITUTIONS  AND  CHANGE 


243 


is  gained,  I  believe,  in  what  we  have  already  learned 
of  the  structure  of  human  happiness.  The  happiness 
of  man  consists  in  the  satisfaction,  not  of  his  primary 
instincts  in  their  severalty,  but  of  his  total  or  central 
will, — the  will  to  power.  And  power,  while  it  need  not 
be  competitive,  can  only  exist  where  there  is  some¬ 
thing  to  push  against ,  and  will  be  in  direct  proportion 
to  such  resistance. 

Now  the  most  humanly  satisfying  type  of  power,  so 
we  thought,  is  the  power  of  an  idea,  whether  in  per¬ 
suading  other  men  or  in  shaping  institutions.  The  exer¬ 
cise  of  any  such  power  presupposes  that  in  institu¬ 
tions  there  are  changes  to  be  made;  the  same  type  of 
maladjustment  which  might  dispose  us  to  pessimism 
may,  from  this  standpoint,  appear  as  a  necessary  con¬ 
dition  of  complete  welfare.  An  unwitting,  and  hence 
all  the  more  cogent,  testimony  to  this  fact  may  be 
found  in  the  biography  of  pessimism,  in  the  curious 
circumstance  that  when  pessimism  becomes  a  doctrine 
or  propaganda,  it  brings  with  it  the  first  stages  of  its 
own  cure.  And  for  this  reason.  That  wherever  pessi¬ 
mism  assumes  poetic  or  philosophic  garb,  it  has  already 
lifted  its  head  above  its  preoccupation  with  instincts, 
and  has  begun  a  campaign  in  the  world  of  ideas,  if 
only  to  decorate  with  a  cosmic  frame  its  own  sense- 
experiences,  as  did  Omar  Khayyam.  The  dissatisfied 
spirit  has  begun,  in  its  fancy,  to  be  a  creator  of  other 
worlds,  having  well  shattered  its  own  to  bits, — a  creator 
of  other  polities,  natural  laws,  monopolies,  markets, 
pieties,  scenes,  adventures.  And  as  within  itself,  the 
eternal  Ideal  plows  up  the  field  of  a  sodden  humanity, 


244 


SOCIETY 


it  discovers  in  the  career  of  its  own  condemnation  of 
life,  as  a  form  of  thought,  a  life  that  is  worth  clinging 
to.  For  the  pessimist,  it  is  just  his  pessimism  and  its 
preaching  that  is  of  value.  For  this  is  his  edition  of 
the  will  to  power  through  ideas. 

A  world  in  which  there  were  no  institutional  misfit 
would  he  a  world  in  which  such  a  will  to  power,  or 
indeed  any  other,  would  be  as  nearly  as  possible  with¬ 
out  human  occupation;  it  might  provide  a  type  of 
happiness  bovine  or  angelic,  but  certainly  not  human. 

It  would  be  natural,  but  still  perverse,  to  infer  from 
this  psychological  truth  the  desirableness  of  preserv¬ 
ing  or  courting  or  importing  a  degree  of  evil  in  order 
that  human  nature  may  gain  full  satisfaction.  Men 
find,  or  once  found,  for  example,  a  certain  happiness 
in  war:  war  is  one  way  of  bringing  the  will  to  power 
into  operation  against  social  evils,  changing  institu¬ 
tions,  or  at  least  leaving  one’s  mark  upon  them;  and 
there  are  occasions  when  because  of  abnormalities  in 
political  growth,  social  construction  must  take,  like  sur¬ 
gery,  the  paradoxical  form  of  destruction.  Yet  no  folly 
could  be  blinder  than  that  of  prescribing  or  seeking  war 
as  a  remedy  for  the  maladies  of  the  human  spirit :  for 
no  war  can  act  as  such  a  remedy  unless  it  is  just;  and 
no  war  is  just  unless  it  is  inevitable.  The  place  of  a 
just  cause  of  war,  or  of  any  other  evil,  as  a  pou  sto  in 
the  process  which  makes  our  happiness,  does  not  logi¬ 
cally  admit  it  to  any  other  place.  The  knight  errant 
without  a  dragon  or  other  foe  may  be  a  melancholy 
figure ;  but  he  must  still  kill  the  dragon  when  he  meets 
him,  and  not  coddle  him  along  to  keep  an  exercise  for 


INSTITUTIONS  AND  CHANGE 


245 


his  mettle.  Likewise  with  our  social  misfits:  he  who 
should  counsel  others,  or  himself,  to  put  up  with  such 
an  evil  because  it  affords  pleasing  activity  to  contend 
against  it,  is  guilty  of  something  more  than  a  bull. 
Evil  has  its  own  sources ;  and  there  is  no  cause  for 
anxiety  lest  there  should  be  enough  of  it  to  make 
permanent  opportunity  for  the  powers  of  all  men.  For 
a  large  part  of  evil  is  an  incidental  product  of  social 
progress  itself. 

Ill 

The  improvement  of  institutions,  and  social  progress 
generally,  is  responsible  for  a  certain  amount  of  our 
awareness  of  misfit.  For  progress  enhances  sensitivity 
and  desire,  and  both  of  these  bring  an  increase  of 
suffering. 

Everyone  has  noticed  the  ineffective  efforts  of  chil¬ 
dren  to  place  and  diagnose  their  own  pains.  They  are 
slightly  cold ;  they  do  not  know  that  they  are  cold,  but 
only  that  they  are  “uncomfortable”:  an  older  person 
must  interpret  to  them  their  own  restlessness.  If  we 
think  of  the  child  as  more  sensuous  than  the  adult,  we 
are  mistaken.  The  adult  is  much  more  alive  to  sensa¬ 
tions  ;  he  has  keener  discrimination  and  keener  enjoy¬ 
ment.  Only  an  adult  can  be  an  epicure,  or  a  colorist, 
or  a  musician.  The  child  is  incapable  of  being  “disso¬ 
lute”;  for  nature  entrusts  only  by  degrees  the  more 
poignant  experiences  of  sense.  The  fitness  of  the 
arrangement  is  that  the  appeal  of  sense  should  in¬ 
crease  only  as  the  policy  of  the  self  develops  to  judge 


246 


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that  appeal.  The  adult  is  defined  as  the  person  who 
can  let  things  hurt ,  while  keeping  them  subordinate  to 
his  central  will.  On  the  march,  knowing  that  water  is 
not  to  be  had,  one  is  able  (as  the  child  is  not)  to  put 
thirst  out  of  mind;  busy,  one  forgets  his  hunger;  con¬ 
versing,  bodily  weariness  drops  away.  Yet  the  same 
sensations,  when  they  get  their  hearing,  have  a  defini¬ 
tion  and  force  proportionate  to  the  force  of  the  central 
will.  Mature  self-consciousness  means  that  every  im¬ 
pulse  of  a  many-stringed  nature  has  a  more  perfect 
individuality.  The  organism  can  afford  to  be  plural  be¬ 
cause  (and  only  so  far  as)  it  is  firmly  one.  This  is 
hardly  a  mere  happy  adaptation  of  unrelated  forces: 
it  is  more  likely  that  the  added  mentality  and  horizon 
are  direct  agents  in  promoting  the  keenness  of  sense- 
experience.4 

A  similar  relation  holds  good  between  earlier  and 
later  stages  of  culture:  the  race  is  but  gradually  let 
down  into  the  pit  of  knowledge  of  evil,  for  it  is  an 
incident  of  the  same  process  which,  increasing  goods 
and  their  appreciation,  we  call  progress.  Primitive 
culture  is  by  definition  a  culture  preoccupied  in  the 
external  struggle,  hence  little  free  to  delve  into  itself. 
The  same  changes  of  occupation  that  have  brought 
economic  power,  have  brought  separateness  of  interest 
and  the  self-consciousness  that  is  born  of  contrast: 
herding  and  agriculture  make  occasion  for  setting  my 
labor  and  its  products  against  your  labor  and  its 
products,  bring  private  property  with  its  relative  soli- 

4  This  is  in  accord  with  onr  view  of  the  nature  of  pleasure  and  pain. 
See  above,  pp.  106  f.  and  147,  note. 


INSTITUTIONS  AND  CHANGE 


247 


tude  and  concentration  npon  self,  generate  the  schem¬ 
ing  Jacob  and  the  thieving  Hermes.  Division  of  labor 
likewise  means  a  relative  privacy  in  the  midst  of  the 
day’s  work,  and  promotes  comparisons  of  value  and 
pains.  Money,  as  a  medium  between  production  and 
consumption,  means  the  necessity  of  enquiring  into 
my  wants  before  I  set  about  purchase  and  enjoyment. 
All  these  things  together  mean  increased  attention  to 
pain  and  desire;  quite  apart  from  the  similar  result 
of  gathering  wealth,  leisure,  and  the  hastening  of  the 
cushioning-process  above  referred  to,  with  its  inequity, 
bitterness,  and  reflection.  Those  who  fall  behind  in  the 
uneven  social  movement  are  hardly  worse  off  in  the 
physical  life  than  in  the  wealth-less  stages;  for  the 
most  part  they  are  better  off — there  is  no  new  suffer¬ 
ing  except  in  status  and  pride.  But  old  physical  evils 
have  now  become  social  wrongs,  and  hurt  with  a  new 
pain;  the  social  difference  sharpens  self-awareness, 
and  those  who  lose  share  as  equals  with  those  who  gain 
in  the  added  consciousness  of  the  risks  of  fortune  in 
goods  and  evils.  Thus  maladjustments  which  were 
tolerable  and  relatively  unnoticed,  because  kept  in  the 
obscure  margins  of  the  mind,  become  intolerable,  and 
begin  to  press  upon  the  shapes  of  institutions.  The 
very  process  by  which  discomforts  are  relieved  creates' 
the  capacity  for  new  discomfort.5 

6  This  is  the  social  form  of  that  endless  chain  which  Schopenhauer 
found  in  the  life  of  individual  will.  But  it  is  not  a  treadmill.  The 
evils  are  in  new  places.  And  old  issues — some  of  them — are  perma¬ 
nently  settled.  We  have — as  the  flux-philosophers  tell  us — a  perpetual 
movement,  self -renewed:  but  it  is  not  as  they  suggest  a  meaningless  and 
directionless  movement. 


248 


SOCIETY 


IV 

The  circumstance  of  the  origin  of  a  part  of  social 
misfit,  created  as  it  is  by  growing  social  good,  sug¬ 
gests  that  at  least  this  part  of  evil  is  such  as  human 
nature  is  well  fitted  to  cope  with,  and  to  take  up  into 
the  activity  of  its  own  will  to  power.  And  this  will  be 
the  case  if  institutions  are  plastic  to  the  pressure  upon 
them.  The  very  misfits  of  the  social  order  will  be  grist 
for  human  nature  provided  this  postulate  is  complied 
with: 

Whatever  in  institutions  tends  at  any  time  to 
deform  human  nature  shall  be  freely  subject 
to  the  force  of  dissatisfaction  naturally 
directed  to  change  them . 

Any  residual  dissatisfaction  with  social  arrange¬ 
ments  may,  in  point  of  fact,  be  regarded  as  a  constant 
force  acting  upon  these  arrangements,  and  sure,  in 
the  course  of  time,  to  have  its  effect  upon  them.  There 
is  an  old  physical  experiment  in  which  one  is  to  put 
into  a  glass  vessel  a  mixture  of  shot,  corn,  sawdust, 
iron  filings,  etc.,  and  place  the  vessel  on  a  window  stool 
subject  to  constant  jarring  by  passing  traffic.  In  course 
of  time  the  mixed  contents  stratify  themselves  in  order, 
with  the  densest  at  the  bottom.  It  requires  no  great 
force,  but  only  a  constant  force — if  there  is  sufficient 
motion — to  ensure  that  any  tendency  shall  reach  its 
goal.  And  so,  wherever  social  shiftings  take  place,  there 
is  the  opportunity  for  the  edging  forward  of  human 
nature.  And  as  this  changing  and  shifting  has  been 


INSTITUTIONS  AND  CHANGE 


249 


going  on  for  many  ages,  the  probability  is  great  that 
all  the  coarser  and  more  serious  maladjustments  have 
been  remedied,  and  that  we  have  in  our  present  insti¬ 
tutions  a  fit  in  sketch  of  human  nature  in  general. 

If  institutions  have  not  always  submitted  themselves 
to  this  pressure,  it  might  seem  that  in  our  Western 
world  at  any  rate,  where  all  complaint  is  legitimate, 
every  idea  has  a  hearing,  and  the  art  of  representative, 
if  not  of  popular,  legislation  has  appeared,  a  miracle 
and  a  godsend,  legislation  participated  in  by  the  con¬ 
sumers  thereof, — it  might  seem  that  all  institutions, 
after  ages  of  cakedness,  had  now  finally  reached  a 
state  of  sufficient  flux.  And  in  truth,  the  chief  impedi¬ 
ment  to  a  free  human  nature  is  now,  not  social  un¬ 
readiness  to  entertain  remedies  that  are  certain  to  cure, 
but  ignorance , — ignorance  of  its  own  desires  and  how 
to  secure  their  satisfaction. 

Legislation  must,  indeed,  always  lag  behind  the  mar¬ 
ket-place  in  its  part  of  the  cushioning  process ;  because 
its  inventions,  as  distinct  from  the  commercial  kind, 
must  be  so  far  thought  through  as  to  take  their  place 
at  once  in  an  imposing  system  of  ideas,  The  Laws,  and 
must  be  suited  to  universal  and  compulsory  consump¬ 
tion.  In  both  cases  we  must  get  on  by  making  multi¬ 
tudes  of  experiments  and  selecting  from  the  results; 
but  experimenting  with  a  law  must  always  be  a  graver 
thing  than  experimenting  with  a  new  breakfast  food. 
Law-making  is  a  most  philosophic  undertaking, — or 
should  be.  Otherwise  it  is  either  entangled  in  its  own 
technique,  and  becomes  a  sinecure  for  all  the  self-in¬ 
terest  and  intellectual  viciousness  of  its  promoters ;  or 


250 


SOCIETY 


else,  thrown  wide  open  to  the  direct  popular  argument 
from  sore  to  salve,  it  loses  itself  in  temporizing,  incon¬ 
sistency,  and  rudderless  drifting.  Laws  can  only  be 
competently  perceived  through  institutions,  institu¬ 
tions  through  history,  and  history  through  human 
nature. 

Nevertheless,  a  radical  with  a  conscience  and  an 
intellect  even  moderately  equal  to  his  task  has  at  this 
hour  the  world  before  him,  a  world  desirous  as  never 
before  to  do  justice  through  its  institutions  to  all 
human  needs.  This  world  requires  to  be  convinced  only 
(1)  that  his  remedies  will  remedy,  and  (2)  that  they 
will  not  at  the  same  time  destroy  more  than  they  create. 
And  as  a  guarantee  for  this  second  and  greater  in¬ 
terest,  it  will  require  in  him  an  understanding  of  the 
history  of  institutions  which  sees  in  them  something 
greater  than  shifting  arbitrariness  or  rough  expediency 
or  folly  and  oppression, — which  appreciates  their  slow 
tendency  to  bring  humanity  into  the  full  birthright  of 
its  own  freedom. 


y 

For  if  society  is  conservative,  it  is  so,  at  least  in  part, 
because  it  has  something  to  conserve. 

If  nature  could  not  allow  the  growth  of  sensitivity 
in  individuals  apart  from  their  growth  in  will,  neither 
can  society,  except  at  its  peril,  lend  itself  to  the  liberty 
of  clamorous  desire  unless  there  is  sufficient  substance 
in  men’s  grasp  of  what  is  necessary  and  common.  The 
license  that  has  commonly  followed  sudden  grants  of 


INSTITUTIONS  AND  CHANGE 


251 


liberty6  is  no  argument  against  grants  of  liberty;  but 
it  has  its  argument.  It  shows  that  men  had  conceived 
the  restraint  that  was  over  them  too  inimically,  not 
perceiving  how  far  the  social  order  was,  in  Rousseau’s 
phrase,  compelling  them  to  be  free.  It  shows,  then,  that 
the  protest  was,  in  part,  inconsiderate  and  unjustified; 
and  that  the  conservative  party  was,  to  just  that  ex¬ 
tent  and  no  more,  right  in  regarding  the  liberals  as 
rebels. 

He  who  would  change  an  institution  or  experiment 
with  it  must  know  his  own  will  far  enough  to  see  that 
he  wishes  the  innovation  itself  to  be  a  conserved  and 
protected  structure.  The  only  value  any  experiment 
can  possibly  have  is  that  something  may  be  established. 
It  is  not  an  accident  that  the  noisest  criers  for  toler¬ 
ance,  when  they  have  secured  free  way  for  their  own 
idea,  have  commonly  shown  a  wish  to  enforce  that  new 
idea  with  the  old  intolerance.  They  are  but  waking  up 
to  the  logic  of  their  own  ambition ;  which  was,  not  that 
institutions  should  weaken  and  soften  or  disappear, 
but  primarily  that  some  particular  stubborn  institu¬ 
tion  should  yield,  and  the  same  good  force  be  spent  on 
maintaining  something  worthier.  There  is,  literally 
speaking,  no  such  thing  as  being  too  conservative :  but 
it  is  terribly  easy  to  be  conservative  of  the  wrong 
objects.  Hence  place  must  be  made  in  all  our  institu¬ 
tions  for  our  common  ignorance,  our  need  to  learn 
through  the  free  clash  of  convictions, — this  is  the  valid 
element  in  Mill’s  plea  for  social  liberty,  the  valid 

6  See  Arthur  T.  Hadley,  Freedom  and  Responsibility,  pp.  40  ff. 


252 


SOCIETY 


element  in  American  experimentalism.  The  principle 
is,  that 

Conserving  force  shall  he  proportionate  to 
certainty, — 

certainty  that  the  institution  furnishes  for  the  given 
society  the  best  solution  so  far  proposed  of  its  own 
problem.  This  fourth  postulate  we  must  place  beside 
the  last. 


CHAPTER  XXX 


EDUCATION 

IN  handing  on  to  a  new  generation  its  notions  of 
what  life  means,  of  what  the  several  instincts 
mean,  society  is  compelled  to  face  itself,  take  stock  of 
its  ideas,  pass  judgment  upon  itself.  The  advantage 
of  education,  therefore,  is  not  exclusively  to  the  young. 
Dealing  with  growing  minds,  society  perforce  domes¬ 
ticates  the  principle  of  growth:  for  self-consciousness 
is  never  purely  complacent,  least  of  all  when  its  eyes 
are  the  critical  and  questioning  eyes  of  a  child,  a  new 
vital  impulse,  unharnessed  and  unbought. 

It  strikes  us  as  notable — when  we  think  how  severe 
is  the  effort  of  self-review,  and  how  little  satisfying — 
that  society  has  never  been  content  simply  to  let  its 
young  grow  up.  Unintentional  suggestion  might  con¬ 
ceivably  have  been  left  to  dt>  its  work  on  a  gregarious 
and  imitative  human  substance.  To  an  unknown  degree 
children  always  educate  themselves,  and  what  they  thus 
do  is  well  done.  But  from  earliest  visible  times,  educat¬ 
ing  has  been  a  deliberate  process.  Human  beings  clearly 
like  to  educate :  for  better  or  worse  this  activity  is  an 
especially  human  form  of  the  parental  instinct.  It  looks 
at  times  as  if  the  young  serve  simply  as  a  stimulus  to 
an  activity  of  the  elders  of  which  they,  the  children,  be¬ 
come  the  helpless  objects,  an  activity  which  tends  to 


254 


SOCIETY 


increase  without  limit  as  leisure  and  the  economic  mar¬ 
gin  grow.  Children  create  the  necessity,  but  also  the 
exciting  opportunity,  for  society’s  effort  to  make  vocal 
the  sense  of  its  ideals,  customs,  laws,  and  (ominous 
word)  to  inculcate  them. 

But  though  a  profound  human  interest,  analytic 
self-consciousness  is  difficult  and  slow  of  growth;  and 
as  individual  self-consciousness  begins  in  the  form  of 
memory,  social  self-consciousness  begins  in  the  form 
of  history.  For  this  reason,  society  has  always  tried 
to  expound  itself  largely  through  the  story  of  its  own 
past,  its  folklore,  epic,  and  myth.  But  with  history 
there  has  been  from  the  earliest  times  a  demand  for 
images  of  that  to  which  history  leads,  images  of  a  more 
completely  interpreted  will  such  as  have  hovered  before 
the  imaginations  of  dreamers,  prophets,  reformers. 
Thus  in  the  work  of  educating,  social  self-consciousness 
expands  until  it  envisages  more  or  less  darkly  the  en¬ 
tire  tale  of  tribal  destiny  from  its  beginnings  to  its  goal. 

Because  education  requires  this  self-conscious  look¬ 
ing  before  and  after,  a  discussion  of  education  in  the 
midst  of  a  book  on  the  remaking  of  human  nature  must 
anticipate  the  end,  and  in  some  degree  mirror  the  entire 
undertaking.  But  deliberate  educational  effort  has  its 
own  specific  part  to  play,  more  or  less  separable  from 
other  parts  of  the  remaking  process.  Bending  over  the 
younger  generation  during  the  long  years  before  the 
full  impact  of  law  and  institution  is  allowed  to  reach 
them,  transmitting  its  wishes  through  the  protecting 
(and  no  doubt  refracting)  media  of  family  and  school, 
speaking  at  least  as  much  through  what  it  is  as  through 


EDUCATION 


255 


what  it  tries  to  say  for  itself,  society  in  educating  is 
exercising  a  function  whose  purpose,  like  that  of  most 
natural  organs,  we  hut  gradually  become  fully  aware 
of.  In  our  day  education  affects  the  technical;  it  be¬ 
comes  highly  doctrinaire;  it  is  the  jousting  place  of  all 
the  new  realisms,  pragmatisms,  behaviorisms,  psy¬ 
chologisms  of  all  brands.  We  need  to  think  anew  of  the 
nature  of  this  organic  function  and  of  its  control. 

I 

There  was  a  time  when  we  might  have  defined  educa¬ 
tion  as  a  continuation  of  the  reproductive  process. 
Physical  reproduction  supplies  more  of  the  same 
species :  social  reproduction  supplies  more  of  the  same 
tribe  or  nation.  From  the  beginning  of  organized  social 
life,  each  people  has  regarded  its  own  folkways  as  an 
asset,  distinctive  and  sacred;  in  imposing  them  upon 
the  new  brood  it  has  supposed  itself  to  be  conferring 
its  most  signal  benefit.  And  the  newcomers,  most  of 
them,  seem  to  have  adopted  this  view:  they  have  as 
little  fancied  it  a  hardship  that  the  social  order  should 
impose  its  type  upon  them  as  that  their  parents  should 
have  given  them  their  physical  image.  It  has  simply 
completed  the  definition  of  what  they  are. 

We  have  not  outgrown  this  conception  of  education. 
We  still  speak  of  it  as  a  ‘ preparation  for  life,’  under¬ 
standing  by  ‘life’  a  certain  kind  of  life,  that  which 
marks  out  our  own  group  or  nation.  It  still  seems  to 
us  the  essential  failure  of  education  that  our  children 
should  find  themselves  a  misfit  in  ‘life’;  so  we  steer 
them  toward  the  existing  grooves  of  custom  as  a  matter 


256 


SOCIETY 


of  duty — I  do  not  say  of  duty  to  society,  but  of  duty  to 
the  children  themselves.  Discussing  the  place  of  classics 
in  Prussian  schools,  Kaiser  Wilhelm  II  said  (Decem¬ 
ber,  1890),  “It  is  our  duty  to  educate  young  men  to 
become  young  Germans,  and  not  young  Greeks  or  Ho¬ 
mans.’ ’  And  what  do  other  nations  expect  of  their 
schools,  if  not  to  bring  forth  after  their  kind?  What 
are  the  facts  of  our  own  practice  ? 

We  certainly  do  not  put  all  traditions  on  the  same 
level,  any  more  than  all  languages  or  all  sets  of  laws. 
But  neither  we  nor  any  other  modern  nation  limits  its 
offering  to  its  own  type.  We  train  our  wards  to  some 
extent  to  become  young  Greeks,  Homans,  Britons, 

_  y' 

Frenchmen,  Germans,  Asiatics,  as  well  as  young 
Americans.  We  teach  them  history  and  geography,  not 
indifferently,  but  still  to  a  liberal  distance  from  our  own 
center  of  space  and  time.  We  pave  the  way  to  litera¬ 
tures  other  than  our  own.  We  discreetly  announce  the 
existence  of  other  religions.  Better  than  this,  we  offer 
them  at  the  outset  the  free  and  primitive  worlds  of 
fairyland  and  legend  where  all  desires  find  satisfaction. 
We  give  them  poetry  and  drama,  dealing  with  social 
orders  invitingly  different  from  the  actual  order,  such 
as  must  set  tingling  any  cramped  or  unused  nerve 
in  growing  nature,  and  so  give  voice  to  the  latent  rebel 
in  our  youth,  or  the  latent  reformer.  Our  homes  and 
schools  habitually  look  out  upon  ‘the  world’  not  as  a 
decorous  and  settled  place,  but  as  a  comparatively 
perilous  and  unfinished  place,  calling  for  much  courage 
and  chivalrous  opposition,  requiring  much  change.  The 
career  of  the  hero  who  redresses  an  untold  number  of 


EDUCATION 


257 


wrongs  still  hovers  as  a  wholly  accessible  destiny  be¬ 
fore  the  fancies  of  our  childhood.  To  this  extent,  we 
warn  our  successors-to-be  against  our  own  fixity,  put 
the  world  before  them,  and  set  them  free  from  our 
type.1 

And  to  this  extent,  we  recognize  that  education  has 
two  functions  and  not  one  only.  It  must  communicate 
the  type,  and  it  must  provide  for  growth  beyond  the 
type.  It  is  not  a  mere  matter  of  spiritual  reproduc¬ 
tion,  unless  we  take  reproduction  in  the  wider  sense 
as  an  opportunity  to  begin  over  again  and  do  better, 
the  locus  not  alone  of  heredity  but  of  variation  and  of 
the  origin  of  new  species. 

But  why  insist  at  all  upon  the  reproducing  of  the 
old  type?  and  why  limit  to  “this  extent”  the  scope  of 
the  liberty  of  choice?  Why  do  we  not  display  with 
complete  equableness  all  views  of  the  best  way  of  life 
and  say,  “Now  choose ;  think  out  your  course  for  your¬ 
selves”?  Instead  of  teaching  our  children  our  moral¬ 
ity,  why  not  teach  them  ethical  science  ?  instead  of  reli¬ 
gion,  metaphysical  criticism?  instead  of  our  political 
faith,  political  philosophy?  instead  of  our  manners,  the 

i  Admitting  all  the  abuses  of  mechanical  and  wholesale  popular 
schooling,  I  must  decline  to  believe  as  the  primary  truth  of  any  modern 
nation  that  “It  is  not  in  the  spirit  of  reverence  that  education  is  con¬ 
ducted  by  States  and  Churches  and  the  great  institutions  that  are  sub¬ 
servient  to  them”  (Bertrand  Russell,  Principles  of  Social  Beconstruction, 
p.  158;  reprinted  in  America  under  the  misleading  title,  Why  Men 
Fight).  I  know  of  no  society  which  fails  to  wish  its  children  a  better 
life  than  its  own.  And  especially  at  this  moment,  in  the  war-ridden 
states  of  Europe  a  deep  and  pathetic  tenderness  toward  childhood  is 
evident,  as  if  to  say,  1 1  We  have  made  a  mess  of  our  world :  yours  must 
be  a  better  one.  ”  This  spirit  is  making  itself  felt  in  thorough  revisions 
of  the  plan  of  education  in  France  and  England. 


258 


SOCIETY 


principles  of  aesthetics  ?  In  short,  why  not  make  thinkers 
of  them  rather  than  partisans?  Why  not  abolish  the 
last  remnant  of  that  ancestor-worship  which  dwarfs  the 
new  life  by  binding  it  to  the  passing  life? 

The  answer  is,  \fre  have  no  right  to  aim  at  any 
smaller  degree  of  freedom  than  this,  nor ,  for  the  most 
part ,  do  we:  but  before  a  completely  free  will  can  he 
brought  into  being,  it  is  first  necessary  to  bring  into 
being  a  will.  The  manifest  absurdity  of  asking  a  child 
to  choose  his  own  moral  code  and  the  rest  is  due  not 
alone  to  the  fact  that  he  lacks  the  materials  to  choose 
from,  but  still  more  to  the  fact  that  he  does  not  know 
what  he  wants.  The  first  task  of  education  is  to  bring 
his  full  will  into  existence.  And  this  can  only  be  done 
by  a  process  so  intimate  that  in  doing  it  the  type  is 
inevitably  transmitted.  The  whole  meaning  of  educa¬ 
tion  is  wrapped  up  in  this  process  of  evoking  the  will ; 
and  apart  from  it  nothing  in  education  can  be  either 
understood  or  placed. 

II 

The  will  can  develop  only  as  the  several  instincts 
wake  up  and  supply  examples  of  the  goods  and  evils 
of  experience.  To  bring  instincts  into  action,  all  that 
any  social  environment  need  do  (and  almost  all  it  can 
do2)  is  to  supply  the  right  stimulus,  together  with  an 

2  Noting  in  passing  that  the  exhibition  of  instinctive  behavior  often 
acts  by  suggestion  as  a  substitute  for  the  direct  stimulus;  and  in  gre¬ 
garious  animals  as  an  alternative  stimulus.  And  further,  just  as  artificial 
respiration  may  lead  to  actual  breathing,  so  a  mechanical  repetition  of 
instinctive  behavior  even  under  duress  may  sometimes  work  backward, 
as  if  breaking  a  way  though  an  occluded  channel,  to  set  an  instinctive 
impulse  free.  See  above,  p.  172,  note. 


EDUCATION 


259 


indication  of  what  the  stimulus  means.  A  response 
cannot  be  compelled ;  for  whatever  is  compelled  is  not 
a  response.  No  behavior  to  which  we  might  drive  a 
child  would  be  play:  if  playthings  and  playing  com¬ 
rades  fail  to  bring  out  the  play  in  him,  we  are  all  but 
helpless.  A  response  can  only  be  e-duced. 

If  we  were  dealing  with  an  organism  whose  instincts 
we  did  not  know,  the  educing  process  would  consist 
in  exposing  that  organism,  much  as  one  would  expose 
a  photographic  plate,  to  various  environments  to  see 
which  ones  would  elicit  reactions.  And  in  dealing  with 
a  new  human  being,  always  unknown,  the  work  of 
educing  his  instincts  would  likewise  consist  in  exposing 
him  to  those  stimuli  which  may  appeal  to  him, — to 
speech,  to  things  graspable  or  ownable,  to  color,  form, 
music,  etc.,  to  the  goods  of  cleanliness,  truthfulness, 
and  the  like.  What  powers  any  child  has  of  respond¬ 
ing  to  these  things,  whether  or  how  far  they  will  take 
in  his  case,  neither  he  nor  we  can  know  until  he  has 
been  exposed — and  perhaps  persistently  and  painfully 
exposed — to  specific  examples  of  these  goods. 

This  exposure  is  the  first  work  of  education. 

And  the  first  peril  of  education  is  not  that  the  child’s 
will  will  be  overborne,  but  that  through  no  exposure  or 
inadequate  exposure  to  the  objects  that  would  call  out 
his  best  responses,  he  achieves  only  half  a  will  instead 
of  a  whole  one,  a  will  partly-developed  and  therefore 
feebly-initiative,  casual,  spiritless,  uninterested.  If  I 
were  to  name  the  chief  defect  of  contemporary  educa- 


260 


SOCIETY 


tion,  it  would  not  be  that  it  turns  out  persons  who  be¬ 
lieve  and  behave  as  their  fathers  did — it  does  not :  but 
that  it  produces  so  many  stunted  wills,  wills  prema¬ 
turely  grey  and  incapable  of  greatness,  not  because  of 
lack  of  endowment,  but  because  they  have  never  been 
searchingly  exposed  to  what  is  noble,  generous,  and 
faith-provoking. 

Mr.  Bertrand  Bussell  voices  a  common  objection  to 
immersing  the  defenceless  younger  generation  in  the 
atmosphere  of  the  faiths  religious  and  political  that 
have  made  our  nations.3  Has  he  considered  whether 
in  these  faiths  there  lies  anything  more  than  the  wilful 
choice  of  an  unproved  theory,  anything  of  human  value 
such  as  a  growing  will  might,  for  complete  liberation, 
require  exposure  to?  Politically  guided  education,  he 
feels,  is  dangerous,  and  so  it  is.  But  I  venture  to  say 
that  the  greatest  danger  of  politically  guided  educa¬ 
tion,  particularly  in  democracies  which  feel  themselves 
obliged  in  their  educational  enterprises  to  cancel  out 
against  one  another  the  divergent  opinions  of  various 
parties,  is  that  the  best  places  will  be  left  blank ,  because 
it  is  on  the  most  vital  matters  that  men  most  differ.  The 
pre-war  experience  of  France  in  secularized  education 
has  furnished  a  striking  instance  of  the  principle  that 
in  education  a  vacuum  is  equivalent  to  a  negation.  In 
one  case  as  in  the  other,  instinct  is  robbed  of  its  pos¬ 
sibility  of  response. 

Children  have  rights  which  education  is  bound  to 
respect.  The  first  of  these  rights  is  not  that  they  be 
left  free  to  choose  their  way  of  life,  i.e.,  to  make  bricks 

3  Principles  of  Social  Reconstruction,  chapter  on  Education. 


EDUCATION 


261 


without  either  straw  or  clay.  Their  first  right  is  that 
they  be  offered  something  positive,  the  best  the  group 
has  so  far  found.  Against  errors  and  interested  propa¬ 
ganda  the  growing  will  has  natural  protection :  it  has 
no  protection  against  starvation,  nor  against  the  sub¬ 
stitution  of  inferior  food  for  good  food.  No  social  au¬ 
thority  can  make  pain  appear  pleasure.  No  social  au¬ 
thority  can  make  a  stimulus  of  something  which  has 
no  value.  But  it  is  quite  possible,  through  crowding  out 
the  better  by  the  worse,  to  produce  a  generation  which 
thinks  “  push-pin  as  good  as  poetry,  ”  prefers  bridge 
to  sunsets,  or  worships  the  golden  calf. 

Ill 

But  there  is  a  radical  and  obvious  difference  between 
exposing  a  plate  to  the  light  and  exposing  a  human 
instinct  to  a  possible  stimulus.  Anybody  can  expose 
the  plate,  a  machine  can  expose  it:  the  operation  and 
the  stimulus  are  alike  mechanical.  But  for  the  human 
being  there  is  many  a  possible  stimulus  which  lies 
partly  or  wholly  outside  the  world  of  physics.4  In  these 
regions  of  experience,  neither  a  machine  nor  any  ran¬ 
dom  person  can  achieve  an  exposure. 

It  is  true  that  for  most  of  the  ‘  units  of  behavior , 
which  men  have  in  common  with  the  rest  of  the  animal 
kingdom,  the  stimuli  are  strewn  about  in  such  profu¬ 
sion  that  exposure  takes  place  with  little  or  no  need 

4  As  an  example,  the  stimulus  of  the  ‘instinct  of  curiosity’;  see  p.  81, 
above.  It  is  important  to  bear  in  mind  through  this  discussion  that  the 
‘ stimulus  ’  of  an  instinct  is  understood  to  be  *  the  pre-perception  of  the  end 
as  the  meaning  of  the  initial  situation  ’ ;  p.  58,  above. 


262 


SOCIETY 


for  social  guidance.  It  is  a  commentary  upon  the  arti¬ 
ficiality  of  our  urban  society  that  a  Mme.  Montessori 
is  required  to  remind  us  of  the  need  (among  other 
things)  of  sufficient  and  varied  tactile  stimuli  in  early 
years.  Haphazard  encounters  with  strings,  stones,  and 
sticks,  now  kept  carefully  ‘  cleaned  up  ’  and  out  of  reach, 
aided  by  personal  struggles  with  the  more  exact  weap¬ 
ons  of  toilet  and  table,  once  provided  most  of  the 
stimuli  which  we  must  now  measure  out  with  psycho¬ 
logical  ingenuity.  Hereby  we  are  making  no  doubt 
essential  progress  in  self-consciousness ;  hut  for  young 
children,  country  life  and  self-help  are  still  the  un¬ 
matched  educators  of  their  primary  instincts. 

But  for  the  specifically  human  developments  of 
instinct,  the  stimuli  are  commonly  either  non-existent 
or  imperceptible  except  through  the  behavior  of  other 
human  beings  who  are  actively  responding  to  them. 
Of  these,  the  principle  holds  that  no  one  can  expose  a 
child  to  that  stimulus  unless  he  himself  appreciates  it . 
Imagine  to  what  experience  an  unmusical  person  might 
expose  a  child  under  the  name  of  music.  Consider  what 
it  is  to  which  many  a  human  being  has  been  exposed 
under  the  name  of  mathematics.  To  many  the  true 
statement  that  number  is  an  object  of  profound  instinc¬ 
tive  interest6  would  appear  a  mockery  because,  having 
fallen  into  the  hands  of  the  Philistines  in  the  days  of 
their  initiation  into  the  world  of  number,  they  have 
never  so  much  as  come  into  view  of  its  peculiar 
beauties. 

5  As  an  ingredient  in  the  satisfaction  of  various  central  instincts, 
see  above,  p.  83. 


EDUCATION 


263 


But  it  is  especially  with  regard  to  those  modes  of 
interpreting  instinct  which  constitute  our  moral  and 
religious  tradition  that  this  principle  becomes  impor¬ 
tant.  For  no  one  can  so  much  as  present  the  meaning 
of  an  idea  of  this  kind, — let  us  say  of  a  particular  way 
of  meeting  pain  or  injustice,  a  Spartan  way,  a  Stoical 
way,  or  some  other, — unless  he  himself  finds  satis¬ 
faction  in  that  idea.  And  then  it  follows,  since  sat¬ 
isfaction  and  happiness  are  highly  convincing  states 
of  mind  (understanding  by  happiness  not  tempera¬ 
mental  gaiety,  but  the  subconscious  and  hence  serious 
affirmation  of  life  as  a  whole  by  the  will  as  a  whole), — 
it  follows  that  children  will  tend  to  adopt  the  beliefs 
of  those  whom  they  instinctively  recognize  as  happy, 
and  of  no  others. 

This  is  both  a  protection  to  children  and  a  danger. 
A  protection:  for  surely  the  child  who  has  found  no 
hero  in  the  flesh  from  among  the  supporters  of  the 
existing  order  is  in  no  danger  of  being  overborne  by 
that  order.  If  a  tradition  can  get  no  great  believers, 
it  will  die  a  natural  death.  If  the  wilder  people  are 
genuinely  the  happier, — Bohemians,  declassees,  gay 
outlawry  in  general, — it  is  they  who  will  convince  and 
be  followed.  If  sobriety,  self-restraint,  all  the  “  awful 
and  respectable  virtues”  have  a  value,  whether  as 
necessary  nuisances  on  the  way  to  some  great  good, 
or  as  goods  on  their  own  account,  they  will  find  a 
following  through  the  persons  of  those  who  are  en¬ 
amored  of  those  goods,  so  far  as  such  persons  become 
known. 

If  the  social  group  is  simple,  any  genuine  values  it 


264 


SOCIETY 


has  will  be  likely  to  find  their  way  into  new  minds.  One 
of  the  most  marvelous  examples  of  social  conservation 
has  been  the  transmission  of  folksong ;  yet  if  any  tradi¬ 
tion  has  been  spontaneous  and  unforced,  this  has  been. 
But  in  our  modern  complex  and  split-up  societies,  the 
chances  grow  large  that  many  children  are  never 
reached  by  our  best  ideas,  transmitted  through  an  over¬ 
worked  and  not  markedly  happy  teaching  body.6 

In  any  case,  what  is  transmitted  is  that  intangible 
thing  we  call  belief,  the  effective  belief  of  the  teaching 
surface  of  society.  And  since  the  type  of  any  society 
is  chiefly  defined  by  its  prevalent  beliefs,  we  see  why 
it  is  that  the  process  of  bringing  a  will  into  existence 
inevitably  tends,  as  we  said,  to  reproduce  the  type. 

Perhaps  it  is  the  best  of  our  values  that  lead  the 

6  If  the  chief  excellence  of  teachers  in  a  parsimonious  democracy  is 
to  spend  much  time,  teach  as  many  as  possible,  make  neat  reports  show¬ 
ing  high  averages  of  prize-made  punctuality,  and  ‘prepare’  their  charges 
for  the  enjoyment  of  something  else  than  what  is  before  them,  we  shall 
produce  and  deserve  little  else  than  a  constitutionally  weary  and  common¬ 
place  citizenry. 

The  idea  of  ‘preparation,’  an  indispensable  workshop  notion  for  those 
who  consider  educational  systems  as  a  whole,  is  a  disease  when  it  be¬ 
comes  prominent  in  the  minds  of  the  children.  What  children,  and  poets, 
never  forget  is  that  “Life  is  now!  the  center  of  the  universe  is  here! 
the  middle  point  of  all  time,  this  moment !  ”  If  children  are  led,  for 
example,  to  read  good  writers  in  order  that  they  may  hereafter  enjoy 
good  writers,  their  chance  is  lost.  The  only  justifiable  reason  for  putting 
a  good  writer  into  their  hand  is  that  he  is  good  and  can  be  enjoyed  then 
and  there.  I  do  not  say  understood:  for  children  have  great  powers  of 
living  on  a  future  understanding. 

That  the  first  qualification  of  a  teacher  is  to  be  happy  has  perhaps 
never  been  propounded  as  an  educational  doctrine.  Yet  it  is  a  fair 
question  whether  truth  has  been  more  harmed  by  those  who  are  wrong 
but  happy  (if  there  are  any  such)  than  by  those  who  are  right  but 
unhappy. 


EDUCATION 


265 


most  perilous  lives,  are  most  easily  lost  or  defaced  in 
the  relay  of  the  generations:  but  determination  and 
system  will  not  save  them.  Ethics  and  religion  must 
he  removed  from  set  courses  of  public  instruction  un¬ 
less  the  believers  are  there;  for  mechanical  teaching 
of  these  things  is  worse  than  none.  Every  society  has, 
besides  its  rebels,  who  are  frequently  persons  of  great 
faith,  many  members  who  have  dragged  themselves 
barely  to  the  edge  of  a  creed ;  what  such  persons  trans¬ 
mit  is  hardly  that  creed,  but  a  pestilential  belief  in  the 
moral  painfulness  of  one’s  intellectual  duty. 

But  given  the  believer,  the  more  vigorous  and  affirma¬ 
tive  his  belief,  the  better.  Life  becomes  worth  living 
according  to  the  greatness  of  faith,  not  the  lack  of  it.  If 
any  element  of  a  great  faith  proves  wrong,  its  greatness 
survives  as  a  standard  to  be  reached  by  what  displaces 
it.  According  to  this  measure  will  be  the  dimension  of 
the  wills  we  develop. 

IV 

But  besides  the  dimension  of  the  will,  the  proportion 
of  the  will  is  also  a  matter  of  importance ;  and  to  this 
end  it  is  the  business  of  education  to  see  that  none 
of  the  more  general  instincts  or  groups  of  instincts 
have  an  inadequate  exposure. 

There  is  in  the  human  being,  as  we  saw,  a  large 
power  of  substitution  among  the  instincts,  and  this 
power  increases  as  the  central  current  of  the  will 
grows  strong.  Hence  as  children  get  older  it  becomes 
less  and  less  important  that  all  the  possible  ‘  units  of 
behavior’  should  be  proportionately  called  forth.  It 


266 


SOCIETY 


is  a  pity,  to  be  sure,  if  the  climbing  period  goes  by 
without  a  fair  exposure  to  trees,  fences,  staircases, 
shed  roofs  and  the  like;  but  the  loss  is  not  irremedi¬ 
able.  If  however  any  of  the  more  general  instincts  lies 
long  latent,  as  in  the  case  of  a  delay  in  the  use  of  lan¬ 
guage  which  might  retard  the  development  of  socia¬ 
bility,  the  loss  is  more  serious.  Let  me  speak  of  some 
of  the  questions  of  proportion  which  present  conditions 
of  life  more  especially  raise. 

A  fair  balance  ought  to  be  kept  between  the  instincts 
that  deal  with  persons  and  those  that  deal  with  things. 
The  small  arts  developed  by  handling,  exploring,  con¬ 
trolling,  making,  and  owning  things  must  furnish  all 
the  themes  for  the  give-and-take  of  primitive  socia¬ 
bility:  only  through  the  administering  of  such  all- 
important  privileges  as  those  of  ‘  hollering  down  our 
rain  bar  T  or  ( climbing  our  apple  tree ’  can  the  various 
shades  of  amity  and  hostility  be  realized.  The  child’s 
social  life  will  run  shallow  unless  his  physical  interests 
are  vigorous.  It  is  true  that  the  deeper  his  roots  strike 
into  the  material  world  and  its  mastery,  the  more  occa¬ 
sion  there  is  for  pugnacity,  the  more  difficult  the  per¬ 
sonal  problems  aroused ;  but  also,  the  more  significant 
the  solutions  when  they  come.  It  is  a  mistake  to  try  to 
impose  a  premature  altruism  upon  these  concerns  in 
mine  and  thine.  The  two  sets  of  impulses,  competitive 
and  non-competitive,  must  grow  side  by  side  and  to 
some  extent  independently  before  they  are  ready  to 
recognize  their  relationship.  Meantime,  the  instincts 
occupied  with  things  indicate  by  their  strength  the 
degree  of  mastery  over  nature  we  are  destined  to; 


EDUCATION 


267 


and  the  qualities  developed  in  their  exercise  are  the 
most  primitive  elements  of  ‘  character  ’  and  the  founda¬ 
tion  of  all  likeableness.7  Thus  what  these  instincts  seem 
to  take  from  social  quality,  they  pay  back  again. 

But  between  the  possessive  and  masterful  interest 
in  things  and  the  friendly  interest  in  persons  there  is 
a  middle  term,  most  important  in  the  proportioning 
of  the  will.  I  mean  a  companionable  interest  in  nature . 

"  Being  ‘  alone  ’  has  possibilities  of  occupation  that  come 
not  merely  from  hands  and  senses  but  from  thought 
and  fancy.  A  child  ’s  fear  of  solitude  is  an  evidence  that 
his  imagination  has  already  begun  to  work  in  this 
direction ;  and  what  is  needed  in  order  to  reassure  him 
is  not  that  nature  should  be  depersonalized,  but  that 
his  instinctive  personifying  trait  should  be  made  a  re¬ 
source.  The  growing  self,  if  it  is  to  acquire  depth,  has 
need  of  a  region  not  intruded  upon  by  other  human 
personalities,  not  even  by  such  as  move  across  the  stage 
of  history  and  literature.  While  he  is  in  this  human 
company  the  initiative  of  his  own  thoughts  is  perpetu¬ 
ally  broken:  the  impulses  of  mental  play,  as  sensitive 
as  they  are  precious,  may  easily  be  discouraged  and 
weakened  unless  an  environment  is  found  which  is  at 
once  an  escape  and  a  stimulus.  Our  over-socialized 

i  What  attracts  us  in  another,  old  or  young,  is  always  the  sign  not  of 
animal  vitality  primarily  but  of  validity,  the  quality  of  spirit  which  is 
challenged  and  evoked  in  the  elementary  struggles  with  the  inertia  and 
refractoriness  of  physical  things :  resourcefulness,  persistence,  grit, 
integrity,  fertility  of  design.  Power  over  nature  is  the  most  summary 
expression  of  what  a  spirit  ought  to  have,  and  does  have  in  proportion 
to  its  degree  of  reality:  it  is  this  degree  of  reality  which  we  most  imme¬ 
diately  perceive  in  another,  and  which  is  the  foundation  of  likeableness. 


268 


SOCIETY 


city-bred  children  often  lose  the  capacity  to  be  ‘by 
themselves  ’  without  intolerable  tedium.  Normally,  how¬ 
ever,  ‘  nature ’  means  much  more  than  permission  to 
ruminate:  it  is  a  positive  educing  force.  For  nature 
appears  to  humanity  everywhere,  and  early  to  children, 
as  (more  or  less  cheerfully)  enigmatic:  it  is  deceptively 
quiescent,  or  it  is  eventful  but  with  invisible  agency; 
it  teases  out  essays  in  interpretation.  Society  drives 
away  the  muse, — it  ‘amuses’  us :  but  in  the  presence  of 
nature  the  thread  of  our  fancies  is  drawn  at  once  into 
the  living  fabric  of  the  world,  making  connection  in  the 
freest,  and  I  believe  not  untrue st,  way  with  the  spirit 
that  dwells  there.  Thus  the  foundations  are  being  laid 
for  a  thoughtfulness  more  than  literal  in  its  quality, 
which  may  ripen  in  one  direction  into  scientific  observa¬ 
tion  and  hypothesis,  in  another  toward  merging  with 
the  poetic  and  animistic  gropings  of  the  race.8  In  any 
case,  since  the  imagination  is  actively,  not  passively 
engaged,  and  the  mental  furniture  is  one’s  own,  one 
returns  to  his  social  world  a  little  more  than  before  a 

s  In  making  this  plea  for  the  encouragement  of  an  anthropomorphic 
imagination,  I  am  shamelessly  favoring  what  Professor  Thorstein  Veblen 
has  called  the  “  self -contamination  of  the  sense  of  workmanship  ’ 1  ( The 
Instinct  of  Workmanship,  pp.  52  ff.),  a  deliberate  mixing  of  the  per¬ 
sonal  and  impersonal  phases  of  the  world  which  it  may  prove  difficult 
later  on  to  resolve  into  a  wholly  naturalistic  deadness  of  attitude  toward 
the  physical.  I  do  so  with  my  eyes  open. 

What  and  how  much  solitude  may  mean  to  any  child  cannot  be  told 
in  advance:  education  can  only  effect  the  exposure,  not  at  first  without 
guidance,  and  certainly  not  without  noting  results. 

Let  me  quote  from  a  letter  written  by  Sir  Eabindranath  Tagore  to 
Mr.  Frederic  Eose,  Stockton  Heath,  England.  “Mornings  and  evenings 
[speaking  of  his  school  in  Bolpur]  fifteen  minutes  ’  time  is  given  them 
to  sit  in  an  open  space,  composing  their  minds  for  worship.  We  never 


EDUCATION 


269 


self.  An  individual  1-think  is  growing  which  in  time 
may  have  its  own  contribution  to  the  W e-think  of  the 
crowd. 

But  whether  we  thus  deal  with  the  ‘I-think,’  or  as 
above  with  the  ‘I-own,’  it  is  clear  that  we  are  at  the 
same  time  dealing  with  the  ‘  I-can.  *  The  will  to  power, 
because  of  its  central  position,  is  being  educated  in  all 
education.  But  this  fact  does  not  imply  that  the  will  to 
power  needs  no  distinct  attention.  It  has  its  own  tech¬ 
nique  to  acquire,  and  its  own  interpretation  to  find: 
and  everything  in  the  child ’s  further  career  depends 
on  how  these  problems  are  solved.  Like  all  the  more 
particular  forms  of  instinct  the  will  to  power  needs  to 
be  developed  by  deliberate  exposure  to  its  own  kind 
of  stimulus, — difficulty ,  and  to  its  own  type  of  good, — 
success . 

Play,  we  have  said,  may  be  regarded  as  practice  in 
success.  The  play  obstacles  are  so  chosen  as  to  be  sur¬ 
mountable;  the  play-things  oppose  no  ultimate  resist¬ 
ance  to  their  owner.  But  that  which  seems  the  opposite 
of  play,  the  set  task,  is  needful  to  provide  the  complete 
stimulus  for  this  instinct.  We  need  not  open  the  old 
debate  whether  the  will  is  best  trained  through  what 
one  spontaneously  likes  or  is  c  interested 1  in  or  through 
the  opposite.  Kant  and  William  James  are  far  apart 

watch  them  and  ask  questions  about  what  they  think  in  those  times,  but 
leave  it  entirely  to  themselves,  to  the  spirit  of  the  place  and  the  time  and 
the  suggestion  of  the  practice  itself.  We  rely  more  upon  the  subconscious 
influence  of  Nature,  of  the  association  of  the  place  and  the  daily  life 
of  worship  that  we  live  than  on  any  conscious  effort  to  teach  them.  ” 
The  same  principle  in  a  different  mood  is  found  in  John  Boyle  O’Reilly’s 
poem  “At  School.” 


270 


SOCIETY 


on  many  matters ;  but  in  this  tbey  seem  to  agree,  that 
for  the  sake  of  habitnal  freedom  from  the  domination 
of  feelings  it  is  well  to  do  voluntarily  a  certain  amount 
of  what  is  hard  or  distasteful.  But  I  presume  that  they 
would  equally  agree  that  there  is  little  value  in  effort 
for  effort’s  sake:  there  is  as  little  to  be  gained  from 
pure  difficulty  as  from  pure  ease.  The  right  stimulus 
for  any  instinct  is  4  the  perception  of  the  goal  as  the 
meaning  of  the  beginning’:9  the  right  stimulus  of  the 
will  to  power  is  the  glimmer  of  a  possible  success,  which 
is  another  name  for  hope.  The  only  significant  diffi¬ 
culties,  for  purposes  of  education,  are  those  accom¬ 
panied  by  hope.  It  is  thus  as  idle  a  procedure  to  exhort 
the  child  halted  by  an  obstacle  to  ‘ i  work  it  out  for  him¬ 
self”  as  it  is  to  do  the  work  for  him:  there  is  no  more 
dehumanizing  state  of  mind  than  the  perpetuation  of 
directionless  effort  in  a  despairful  mood.  Education  in 
such  a  case  consists  in  supplying  the  halted  mind  with 
a  method  of  work  and  some  examples  of  success .  There 
are  few  more  beautiful  miracles  than  that  which  can 
be  wrought  by  leading  a  despairing  child  into  a  trifling 
success :  and  there  are  few  difficulties  whose  principle 
cannot  be  embodied  in  such  simple  form  that  success  is 
at  once  easy  and  revealing.  And  by  increasing  the  diffi¬ 
culty  by  serial  stages,  the  small  will,  under  the  cumu¬ 
lative  excitement  of  repeated  and  mounting  success, 
may  find  itself  far  beyond  the  obstacle  that  originally 
checked  it. 

Such  use  of  mental  momentum  is  a  practice  which 
I  believe  all  instinctive  teachers  resort  to.  And  it  shows 


9  P.  58,  above. 


EDUCATION 


271 


incidentally  how  false  a  guide  ‘  interest  ’  may  be  in 
education  when  taken  as  we  find  it.  Lack  of  interest  in 
any  subject  depends,  for  children,  far  less  on  the  nature 
of  the  subject  than  on  a  persistent  thwarting  of  the 
will  to  power  in  dealing  with  it;  interest  accompanies 
any  task  in  which  a  mental  momentum  is  established. 
But  momentum  can  be  gained  only  when  difficulty  can 
be  indefinitely  increased,  so  that  the  very  conditions 
which  may  discourage,  drive  away  interest,  and  even 
induce  loathing  of  a  subject,  are  conditions  which  make 
great  interest  possible  when  the  will  to  power  is  called 
into  lively  action.  We  may  put  it  down  as  a  maxim  of 
■education,  so  far  as  interest  is  concerned, — Without 
difficulty ,  no  lasting  interest. 

But  after  the  education  derived  from  play,  and  from 
the  set  task  with  its  relatively  prompt  conclusion,  the 
will  to  power  has  still  to  deal  with  the  situation  of 
indefinite  delay.  If  it  is  hard  to  point  out  what  in¬ 
stinctive  satisfaction  can  be  found  in  a  deferred  suc¬ 
cess,  it  would  be  hazardous  to  assert  that  there  is  no 
such  satisfaction,  when  we  consider  that  the  greatest 
of  human  ends  are  such  as  are  never  finally  achieved. 
The  imagination,  the  I-think,  would  be  cramped  in  any 
house  narrower  than  infinity;  and  it  is  through  them 
that  the  will  to  power  can  be  led  to  its  next  stage  of 
development.  By  the  aid  of  imagination  I  can  count  it 
a  success  to  have  made  a  definable  approach  to  a  dis¬ 
tant  end;  and  thus  increasingly  long  series  of  means 
that  lie  between  initial  effort  and  attainment  can  take 
on  the  meaning  of  continuous  successes.  If  our  view 


272 


SOCIETY 


of  the  State  is  right,10  it  is  only  as  we  become  capable 
of  taking  an  interest  in  permanent  and  cumulative 
objects  that  the  will  to  power  can  subordinate  its  com¬ 
petitive  to  a  non-competitive  character  and  so  become 
thoroughly  social.  And  it  must  be  seasoned  to  delay, 
before  the  problems  with  which  adolescence  confronts 
instinct  can  be  even  fairly  well  met. 

y 

The  strain  upon  instinct  at  adolescence  is  due  largely 
to  the  delay  imposed  on  the  impulses  of  acquisition 
and  sex.  The  vigorous  ways  of  primitive  food-getting 
and  property-getting  have  to  recognize  their  trans¬ 
formed  selves,  if  they  can,  in  the  devious  routine  of 
labor  and  exchange.  The  sex-interest,  under  any  set 
of  customs  so  far  proposed,  must  learn  to  express 
itself  for  a  time  in  partial  and  sublimated  forms.  The 
circumstance  that  children  usually  grow  up  in  fami¬ 
lies  is  nature  ’s  simple  and  effective  device  for  imposing 
on  the  powerful  current  of  sex-feeling  its  presumptive 
meaning :  every  child  starts  life  with  a  prejudice  to  the 
effect  that  its  affections  will  lead  it  sooner  or  later  to 
found  a  family  resembling  (with  improvements)  the 
family  from  which  it  came.  But  when  sex-interest  be¬ 
comes  a  practical  personal  impulse  it  outruns  the  re¬ 
stricted  possibilities  of  family-founding;  it  meets  on 
every  hand  the  unexplained  check,  the  unexplained 
inner  compunction  quite  as  much  as  the  unexplained 
social  .ruling.  Inhibition  and  prohibition  alike  mean  de- 


10  p.  232,  above. 


EDUCATION 


273 


lay ;  and  the  tendency  of  all  delay  is  to  cast  the  energies 
of  impulse  upward  into  the  region  of  dream,  romance, 
speculation,  substitution. 

Here  the  will  to  power  should  provide  the  great 
natural  resource;  and  will  do  so  if  it  has  been  linked 
with  imagination.  Delay  becomes  supportable  if  imagi¬ 
nation  gives  the  ‘ prolonged  vestibule’11  the  shape  of  a 
conscious  plan,  with  the  many  possible  successes  of 
approach :  and  for  the  acquisitive  impulses  this  may  at 
least  ease  the  situation.  But  delay  becomes  more  than 
tolerable,  it  becomes  significant,  if  it  affords  leeway 
for  the  creation  of  the  plan  itself ,  enlisting  the  inex¬ 
haustible  plan-making  impulses  of  the  youthful  brain. 
Here  the  possibilities  of  the  imaginative  will  to  power 
are  so  great  that  it  may  assume  an  actual  equivalence 
for  the  satisfaction  of  other  instincts ;  and  in  particular 
the  creative  element  in  the  sex-impulse  may  be  largely 
absorbed  or  ‘sublimated’  in  the  new  preoccupation. 

For  at  adolescence  there  is  at  least  one  such  task  of 
creation  which  the  will  cannot  escape,  that  of  construct¬ 
ing  one’s  philosophy.  The  youth  finds  himself,  at  his 
own  estimate,  for  the  first  time  an  equal  among  equals. 
There  is  a  change  in  the  order  of  authority.  Children 
have  an  appetite  for  authority  corresponding  to  their 
mental  unfinishedness  and  rapid  growth;  with  ado¬ 
lescence  comes  a  sense  of  competence  and  a  disposition 
to  be  critical.  The  conceit  of  opinion  in  the  adolescent 
is  not  empty:  it  is  based  on  a  readiness  to  assume 
responsibility,  and  on  an  actual  assumption  of  respon- 


11  P.  206,  above. 


274 


SOCIETY 


sibility  in  the  work  of  mental  world-building  if  not  of 
physical  world-bnilding.  He  appreciates  for  the  first 
time  that  he  has  his  own  life  to  lead;  he  finds  himself 
morally  alone;  he  can  no  longer  endure  to  see  things 
through  the  eyes  of  others. 

In  dealing  with  this  readiness  to  assume  responsi¬ 
bility  and  with  its  accompanying  conceit — the  ‘  instinct 
of  self-assertion  ’  as  it  is  called  by  McDougall  and 
others — we  commit  some  of  our  most  serious  educa¬ 
tional  blunders.  We  customarily  put  the  boy  into  con¬ 
tinued  schooling  where  his  powers  of  serious  action 
beat  the  air,  and  we  rebuke  his  conceit  by  external  pres¬ 
sure:  the  first  wrong  brings  the  second  after  it.  Con¬ 
tinued  schooling  is  inevitable  and  not  necessarily  un¬ 
natural  ;  but  the  only  fair  corrective  for  the  conceit,  or 
rather  the  only  right  environment  for  this  new  develop¬ 
ment  of  instinct,  is  the  actual  responsibility  it  craves. 
Our  school  days  and  years  have  their  intervals;  and 
those  intervals  should  be,  at  least  in  part,  intervals  of 
earning  a  living .  The  boy  who  passes  his  adolescence 
without  knowing  the  feeling  of  doing  a  day’s  work  for 
a  day’s  wages  is  risking  not  only  a  warp  in  his  instinc¬ 
tive  make-up,  but  a  shallowing  of  all  further  work  in 
school  and  college,  because  of  a  loss  of  contact  with 
this  angle  of  reality  at  the  moment  when  his  will  was 
ripe  for  it.  The  mental  helplessness  of  many  students 
who  cumber  the  colleges  of  this  and  other  lands,  the 
dispositional  snobbery  and  self-saving  of  many  an  over¬ 
confident  and  over-sexed  youth  sent  out  as  ‘educated’ 
to  justify  once  more  the  spirit  of  rebellion  against  the 
mental  and  moral  incompetence  of  those  who  assume 


EDUCATION 


275 


to  lead  and  govern,  has  much  of  its  explanation  in  our 
failure  at  this  point.  The  marvel  is  not  that  such  mis¬ 
shapen  births  occur;  the  marvel  is  that  young  human 
nature  shows  such  magnificent  self-righting  qualities 
when  its  will  to  power  is  once  thoroughly  engaged. 

But  whether  or  not  the  concrete  responsibility  he 
craves  is  permitted  him,  the  responsibility  for  mental 
world-building  cannot  be  refused  the  adolescent,  and 
he  will  take  it.  This  is  the  natural  moment  for  tearing 
down  and  rebuilding  the  beliefs  absorbed  during  the 
era  of  his  subordination  to  authority.  Youth  is  meta¬ 
physical  not  because  metaphysics  is  a  youthful  malady 
but  because  youth  has  metaphysical  work  to  do ;  it  has 
been  attached  to  the  universe  through  the  mental  veins 
of  its  authorities;  now  it  must  win  an  attachment  of 
its  own.  The  old  structure  of  belief  will  not  be  wholly 
abandoned, — it  may  not  be  so  much  as  altered;  but  it 
must  be  hypothetically  abandoned,  surveyed  from  out¬ 
side  largely  by  the  aid  of  the  materials /furnished  the 
imagination  in  early  years,  the  young  Greek,  the  young 
Utopian  we  have  implanted  in  the  young  modern.  That 
to  which  one  returns  is  then  no  longer  another’s,  but 
one’s  own.  Originality  is  not  measured  by  the  amount 
of  change,  but  by  the  depth  of  this  re-thinking. 

It  is  originality  of  this  sort,  another  name  for  ‘indi¬ 
viduality,  ’  which  is  chiefly  at  stake  during  adolescence. 
If  the  will  to  power  cannot  take  this  metaphysical  direc¬ 
tion,  individuality  will  be  curtailed  in  its  growth. 'If 
self-assertion  takes  the  form  of  rebellion  against  re¬ 
straint  of  sex-impulse,  individuality  will  be  the  loser 
not  the  gainer.  For  sex-expression  is  the  merging  of  the 


276 


SOCIETY 


individual  in  the  currents  of  the  genus ;  and  early  sex- 
expression  signs  away  just  the  last  and  highest  reaches 
of  individual  development.  It  ensures  mediocrity  and, 
by  a  curious  paradox,  conventionality  of  mind :  nothing 
is  so  uninventive  as  ordinary  sex-rebellion.  Only  de¬ 
ferment  and  sublimation  can  carry  individual  self-con¬ 
sciousness  to  its  own.12 


VI 

If  the  instinctive  life  of  adolescence  is  to  be  domi¬ 
nated  by  the  will  to  power  in  the  form  of  creative 
thinking,  the  impulse  and  power  to  think  must  be  well 
grown;  whereas  originality  of  this  sort  is  the  rarest 
product  of  our  education.  The  abundant  well  of  childish 
curiosity  which  should  now  be  brimming  into  the  chan¬ 
nel  of  explorative  thought,  we  are  commonly  compelled 
to  see  running  dry.  Is  it  necessary  to  stand  helpless 
before  this  serious  failure  of  the  attempt  to  educate? 

The  difficulty  does  not  lie  primarily  in  the  fact  that 
explorative  thought  is  the  most  arduous  way  of  meet¬ 
ing  life,  whether  for  educator  or  educated.  It  is  cer¬ 
tainly  much  simpler  for  both  sides  to  accept  classified 
solutions  for  classified  situations,  after  the  fashion  of 
the  manuals  of  casuistry,  than  to  discount  every  actual 

12  There  is  a  similar  loss  through  hasty  self-assertion  in  the  direction 
of  the  acquisitive  instincts.  To  win  the  early  attention  of  the  market 
it  is  necessary  to  offer  something  new.  Novelty  is  a  natural  product  of 
thought;  but  premature  gathering  of  this  crop  has  a  biological  reaction 
on  the  root.  The  normal  source  of  the  new  is  not  direct  attention  to  the 
new,  but  attention  to  the  real ;  the  novelty  that  comes  as  a  result  of  the 
painful  quest  for  novelty  will  prove  in  the  end  to  be  a  mere  variation 
of  a  conventional  pattern,  like  the  scenarios  of  our  movies,  and  so  in 
time  to  pall  by  its  tawdry  repetition. 


EDUCATION 


277 


hypothesis  in  favor  of  a  possibly  better  one.  But  the 
difficulty  is  that  with  the  best  of  will,  the  power  of  ex¬ 
plorative  thinking  cannot  be  taught  by  direct  effort.  In 
attempting  to  communicate  it,  what  we  pass  on  is  a 
solution,  never  the  mental  process  that  reached  it. 
In  our  laboratories  we  undertake  to  teach  scientific 
method,  the  method  by  which  Galileo  and  his  successors 
made  their  discoveries;  but  our  typical  product  still 
lacks  something  that  was  in  Galileo.  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw 
has  revealed  to  mankind  the  secret  of  Rodin’s  art!  yet 
no  one  takes  Rodin’s  place.  The  attempt  to  transmit 
originality  and  the  attempt  to  transmit  tradition  are 
in  the  same  case :  if  with  the  tradition  could  be  given 
the  power  that  created  it,  tradition  would  have  few 
enemies.  Imitation  never  quite  imitates;  education 
never  educes  the  most  vital  power.  Platonism  produces 
no  other  Plato:  Christianity  yields  no  other  Jesus  nor 
Paul.  If  instead  of  trying  to  conserve  itself,  every  so¬ 
ciety  and  every  tradition  put  out  all  its  efforts  to  make 
new  prophets,  new  iconoclasts,  it  would  still  find  itself 
conserving  the  husk,  unless  the  spring  of  that  unteach- 
able  power  can  be  touched. 

It  is  here  that  we  realize  most  keenly  that  education 
in  the  last  analysis  must  be  on  the  part  of  the  educator 
a  study  of  self -elimination.  It  has  throughout  a  para¬ 
doxical  character.  In  those  beginnings  of  independent 
thought  which  we  found  in  the  Companionable  interest 
in  nature,  ’  the  art  of  exposure  involved  the  withdrawal 
of  society  by  society,  a  self-effacement  which  must 
gradually  become  complete.  It  is  the  moments  of  loneli¬ 
ness  that  are  critical  for  the  spontaneity  of  the  mind; 


278 


SOCIETY 


and  they  can  be  to  some  extent  procured  for  the  grow¬ 
ing  self  by  increasing  the  opportunities  for  learning 
through  one’s  mistakes,  through  experiments  in  oppo¬ 
sition,  and  through  attempts  at  the  solitary  occupation 
of  leadership. 

But  self-eliminating  is  not  a  purely  negative  pro¬ 
cess  ;  for  explorative  thought  has  never  been  a  purely 
disconnected  fact  in  the  universe :  it  has  had  its  sources, 
and  the  last  rite  of  the  self-eliminating  art  would  he  to 
point  out  those  sources  so  far  as  we  know  them.  We  may 
at  least  conduct  our  youth  to  the  farthest  point  on  our 
own  horizon,  to  the  point  from  which  all  that  is  tenta¬ 
tive  is  seen  as  tentative,  all  that  is  small  as  small,  all 
that  is  human  as  merely  human.  “For  each  man,”  we 
may  say  to  them,  “there  is  a  region  of  consciousness 
more  nearly  just  and  free  than  others,  looking  out  to¬ 
ward  absolute  truth,  if  not  seeing  it.  In  all  ages  men 
have  sought  out  this  region,  and  have  found  there  a 
promise  of  freedom  from  all  residual  tyrannies  of  cus¬ 
tom  and  education;  and  from  this  source  innovations 
without  number  have  made  their  way  into  social  life. 
What  men  have  called  their  religion  has  been  the 
inertia-breaking,  bond-breaking  power,  the  mother  of 
much  explorative  thought.  It  has  at  times  exercised  a 
tyranny  of  its  own,  and  this  is  the  most  hideous  of 
tyrannies  because  it  invades  the  region  of  most  inti¬ 
mate  freedom.  But  from  it  has  come  the  power  for 
breaking  these  same  shackles.  There  you  may  find  or 
recover  the  vision  which  nullifies  all  imposture  of  the 
Established,  the  Entrenched,  of  all  the  self-satisfied 
Toryisms,  Capitalisms,  Obscurantisms  of  the  world. 


EDUCATION 


279 


And  there  yon  may  find  what  is  not  less  necessary  for 
originality:  unity  in  the  midst  of  distraction,  compo¬ 
sure  in  the  midst  of  necessary  and  unnecessary  flux, 
quiet  confidence  in  your  own  eyesight  in  presence  of  the 
Newest,  the  Noisiest,  the  Scientificalest,  the  Blatantest, 
all  the  brow-beating  expositions  of  pseudo-Originality, 
pseudo-Progress.  Your  need  is  not  for  novelty  for  its 
own  sake,  but  for  truth :  out  of  your  personal  relation  to 
truth  comes  all  the  novelty  that  can  serve  you,  or  man¬ 
kind  through  you.  This  personal  relation  to  truth  you 
must  win  for  yourself ;  hut  you  may  be  left  with  good 
hope  to  win  it,  for  truth  is  no  dead  thing,  hut  is  itself 
a  spirit.  ’  ’ 

Society,  I  dare  say,  has  never  been  wholly  false  to 
this  self -displacing  conception  of  education:  even  its 
most  hidebound  orthodoxies  have  produced  characters 
capable  of  social  and  political  resistance,  revolution 
if  need  be.  And  the  modes  of  conduct  which  it  has 
attempted  to  transmit  have  been  derived  seldom  from 
a  direct  study  of  its  own  welfare,  chiefly  from  its  own 
view  of  the  dictates  of  this  more  absolute  consciousness. 

For  this  reason,  in  our  own  study  of  society  we  have 
given  little  attention  to  specific  transformations  of  in¬ 
stinct.  If  anything  is  discoverable  more  adequate  and 
final  than  a  given  stage  of  social  transformation,  it  is 
that  which  social  education  reaches  toward,  and  which 
alone  can  concern  us,  even  as  social  beings.  But  our 
view  of  society  as  an  instrument  of  remaking  would  be 
incomplete  without  some  account  of  its  negative  action, 
its  dealing  with  the  rebel  and  the  criminal. 


CHAPTER  XXXI 


THE  RIGHT  OF  REBELLION 

SOCIAL  pressures  are  not  unlike  physical  pres¬ 
sures.  They  consist  usually  of  a  push  and  a  pull 
acting  in  concert — a  vision  of  good  and  a  fear  of  evil. 
In  a  given  society  every  member  is  subject  to  the  same 
general  pressure, — and  though  some  will  be  nearer  the 
fear  of  pain  than  others,  all  will  be  cognizant  of,  and 
governed  by,  the  prevalent  social  punishments.  For 
punishment  is  but  the  realization  of  the  threat  implied 
in  all  pressure;  discipline  and  punishment  are  insepa¬ 
rable  and  coextensive  in  their  domain.  Whatever  justi¬ 
fies  the  one,  justifies  the  other  also. 

Our  position  has  been  that  social  pressure,  and 
therefore  punishment,  is  justified  by  the  fact  that  it 
tends  to  realize  the  individual  *s  will  as  it  could  not 
otherwise  be  realized, — i.e.,  in  so  far  as  our  four  postu¬ 
lates  are  complied  with.  And  if  there  were  any  part  of 
institutional  life  of  whose  value  to  individuals  society 
could  be  absolutely  certain,  it  would  be  justified  (by 
our  last  postulate)  in  conserving  that  part  with  all 
possible  force,  i.e.,  in  resisting  with  its  whole  force  any 
rebellion  against  it. 

But  taking  our  human  ignorance  and  need  of  per¬ 
petual  experiment  well  into  account,  is  there  any  part 
of  our  institutional  life  which  can  claim  such  wholly 


THE  EIGHT  OF  REBELLION 


281 


certain  and  irreplaceable  value?  Nothing,  unless  what 
is  necessary  to  meet  a  necessary  interest.  Such  a  neces¬ 
sity  we  have  recognized  in  the  simple  existence  of  a 
social  order,  and  of  a  political  form  thereof.  But  we 
cannot  argue  from  this  necessity1  that  any  given  society 
or  state  is  necessary;  it  is  only  that  some  particular 
state  is  necessary.  Nevertheless,  existence  in  such 
matters  is  a  great  merit ;  and  under  the  conditions  we 
have  named  the  existing  society  and  state  are  always 
the  best, — the  conditions,  namely,  that  it  is  willing  to 
become  the  best  and  is  offering  itself  in  good  faith  as 
agent  for  this  becoming. 

The  good  faith  of  the  critic  of  society  is  tested,  then, 
by  his  willingness  to  use  society  as  agent  for  its  own 
improvement;  he  is  willing  to  criticise  from  within, 
not  from  without.  The  individual  bearer  of  progress 
has  always  this  in  common  with  the  enemy  of  man¬ 
kind,  that  he  attacks  existing  custom.  But  the  vital 
difference  is  that  the  former  works  through  such  politi¬ 
cal  good-will  as  is  extant,  accepting  in  full  the  obliga¬ 
tion  to  replace  what  he  rejects, — the  latter  rejects  the 
obligation  with  the  custom.  The  former  knows  that 
there  may  be  one  point  of  absolute  worth  in  a  mass  of 
evil,  namely,  good  faith  in  abetting  reform.  If  this  good 
faith  does  not  exist,  he  might  seem  justified  in  rebellion. 

But  the  good  faith  assumed  in  this  theory  is  not 
found  either  in  the  social  order  or  in  its  critics.  On 
both  sides  the  interest  in  justice  is  mixed  with  what¬ 
ever  malice,  greed,  lust,  and  callousness  still  lurks  in 
human  character.  The  art  of  social  life,  and  of  politics 

i  The  logical  error  of  Hobbes  ’  theory  of  sovereignty  lies  here. 


282 


SOCIETY 


in  particular,  is  to  deal  not  with  perfect  beings,  but 
with  fallible  and  defective  wills.  The  question  is  never 
simply,  What  exists?  but  rather,  What  can  be  made 
to  exist?  And  the  issue  of  rebellion,  and  of  its  treat¬ 
ment,  is  not  simply,  Does  good  faith  exist?  on  one 
side  or  on  the  other.  It  is  the  presence  or  absence  of 
faith  in  a  possible  good  faith  that  decides  the  issue. 

This  issue,  by  its  very  statement,  lies  in  regions 
inaccessible  to  observation.  The  last  relations  of  indi¬ 
viduals  and  societies  are  found  in  the  darkness  of  soli¬ 
tary  judgment.  Here  lies  the  perpetual  and  unavoid¬ 
able  opening  for  tragedy  in  history,  the  mutual 
condemnation  of  wills  who  with  like  rectitude  are  unable 
to  reach  either  understanding  or  trust.  It  is  idle  to 
suppose  that  any  legal  formula  can  be  laid  down  to 
determine  when  a  rebellion  is  justified ;  it  is  equal  folly 
to  infer  from  the  absence  of  such  a  principle  that 
rebellion  is  always  unjustifiable.  The  issue  does  not 
lie  within  the  legal  order,  but  it  is  a  definite  issue. 
Within  myself  I  know  whether  I  must  condemn  and 
attack  the  order  in  which  I  live  as  an  order  so  far 
corrupt  that  no  good-will  of  mine  can  hope  to  mend  it. 
And  my  society,  and  my  state,  know  likewise  whether 
they  can  still  have  hope  of  me,  and  whether,  therefore, 
they  shall  take  my  outbreak  as  a  rebellion,  or  as  a 
common  crime. 


CHAPTER 


PUNISHMENT 

IT  is  important  to  make  this  distinction  between  the 
rebel  and  the  criminal.  The  rebel  is  he  who  is  con¬ 
sciously  and  hopelessly  hostile  to  the  social  order. 
The  criminal  is  he  whose  deed  implies  a  rebellion ;  but 
this  implication  is  not  the  conscious  and  avowed  inten¬ 
tion  of  the  deed — the  man  has  simply  taken  what  he 
wanted  in  disregard  of  socially  declared  rights.1  The 
act  of  the  State,  in  each  case,  is  to  make  the  external 
status  correspond  with  the  internal  status.  The  rebel 
by  his  overt  deed  has  shown  himself  inwardly  con¬ 
demning  his  society,  and  so  external  to  it  in  will: 
society  makes  the  exclusion  visible,  and  as  final  and 
irrevocable  as  it  conceives  his  will  to  be.  It  has  not 
first  to  enquire  what  the  rebePs  rights  may  be;  for  he 
has  rejected  his  rights  under  that  order:  the  rebel  is 
the  lost  soul,  and  in  excluding  him  society  is  but  deal¬ 
ing  with  facts,  and  pursuing  its  own  duty  of  conserva¬ 
tion.  As  for  the  criminal,  the  act  of  society  is  first  to 
compel  him  to  face  the  ignored  element  of  rebellion 
implied  in  his  behavior:  he  is  “ arrested,” — i.e.,  at  once 
checked  in  his  policy  and  compelled  to  reflect  and  de- 

i  To  this  extent  all  crimes  come  within  the  legal  category  of  ‘  negli¬ 
gence.’  They  have,  of  course,  the  psychological  character  of  “sin,” — 
the  rejection  of  meaning, — but  here  the  meaning  in  question  is  limited  to 
the  idea  involved  in  the  defined  “rights”  of  the  social  or  legal  person. 


284 


SOCIETY 


cide  in  full  consciousness  of  the  meaning  of  his  act. 
The  social  exhibition  to  the  criminal  of  the  meaning 
of  his  act  is  ‘  punishment. ’  Punishment  is  thus  a  hope¬ 
ful  policy;  it  argues  ‘faith  in  a  possible  good  faith.’ 
It  exceeds  the  criminal’s  right,  in  so  far  as  society 
might  have  insisted  upon  the  implied  rebellion;  but  it 
does  not  exceed  the  right  of  the  human  being  regarded 
as  changeable. 

I 

The  converse  of  this  proposition  is  also  true:  the 
only  hopeful  policy  is  a  policy  of  punishment.  It  is  a 
prevalent  sentiment  that  the  treatment  of  crime  should 
aim  only  at  the  future,  heal  the  disturbed  mind,  and 
drop  all  thought  of  retribution,  which  looks  vengefully 
to  the  past.  As  if  we  could  deal  with  the  future  of  a 
human  mind  except  by  dealing  with  its  maxims;  and 
could  deal  with  its  maxims  except  by  dealing  with  the 
deeds  which  those  maxims  have  produced!  It  is  only 
when  we  give  up  a  person  as  hopeless  that  we  cease 
to  take  issue  with  the  decisions  that  reveal  him ;  he  then 
becomes  to  us,  in  fact,  a  determined  Thing,  and  is  ex¬ 
cluded  from  our  society  as  effectually  as  if  by  some 
magic  curse  we  had  transformed  him  into  an  autom¬ 
aton.  By  such  self-contradictions  false  sentiment  never 
fails  to  reveal  its  own  unreality.  Punishment,  I  repeat, 
is  an  expression  of  social  hope — the  hope  of  remaking 
or  saving  the  man,  by  revealing  to  him  in  the  language 
of  deeds  the  meaning  of  his  own  deed.  Thus  the  typical 
punishment  of  crime  takes  the  form  of  simulating  the 
treatment  of  the  rebel,  the  rightless  man :  it  is  an  exclu- 


PUNISHMENT 


285 


sion  from  society,  within  society, — an  incarceration, — 
an  exclusion  that  may  be  revoked  when  the  argument 
has  its  effect.  The  argument  is  clearer  in  proportion 
as  the  element  of  physical  suffering  is  minimized.  The 
suffering  of  punishment  should  reveal  the  worth  of 
what  the  criminal  has  ignored:  his  liberty,  his  free 
companionship  and  friendship,  his  political  powers, 
his  ability  to  make  and  execute  plans  in  the  community 
at  large,  his  right  to  build  continuously  on  an  achieved 
degree  of  power  and  station,  however  modest.  Discon¬ 
tinuity  is  a  sufficient  argument, — if  any  argument  is 
sufficient.  And  if  none  is  sufficient,  the  criminal  is  in¬ 
deed  the  rebel;  and  must  be  so  treated.  The  exclusion 
must  be  as  permanent  as  the  unconvinced  will. 

The  truth  is  that  society  cannot  punish  unless  it  can 
create  a  ‘  4  conviction. ’  9  For  as  long  as  the  criminal 
retains  the  maxim  of  his  deed,  his  suffering  is  a  mere 
hardship, — not  an  argument.  The  hardship  becomes 
punishment  only  in  so  far  as  he  perceives  and  accepts 
its  meaning.  There  can  be  no  retribution  without 
reformation ;  this  is  the  true  principle  underlying 
modern  changes  in  the  treatment  of  delinquency  and 
crime.  And  the  same  principle  reveals  the  inherent 
difficulty  in  the  whole  theory  of  punishment,  as  an  in¬ 
completely  transformed  exhibition  of  social  resent¬ 
ment,  or  pugnacity.  For  society  fails  to  convince,  and 
must  always  fail  to  convince,  unless  it  actually  has  in 
itself  the  good  faith  and  good  will  of  which  it  would 
persuade  him.  It  must  be  able  to  point  beyond  those 
maladjustments  which  have  borne  hard  on  the  indi¬ 
vidual,  and  have  made  society  itself  a  partner  in  his 


286 


SOCIETY 


crime,  to  the  only  pure  and  eternal  element  possible 
in  a  human  society,  the  will  to  correct,  with  his  help, 
its  own  errors.  But  punishment,  having  the  external 
shape  of  revenge,  and  administered  by  something  less 
than  holy  wills,  runs  counter  to  this  revelation  and 
obscures  it.  The  puishment  of  crime  is,  in  form,  an¬ 
other  crime.  The  act  of  punishing  always  contains 
elements  which  tend  to  defeat  its  own  intention.  As 
the  executioner  and  the  warrior,  though  their  offices 
were  sanctified,  have  been  counted  unclean,  and  the 
hands  of  those  that  have  carried  out  the  dead :  so  the 
necessary  meeting  of  evil  seems  attended  with  the 
fatality  of  participating  in  the  evil. 

The  same  motives  which  in  the  dialectic  of  experi¬ 
ence  drove  individual  expression  of  pugnacity  from 
punishment  to  forgiveness  thus  have  their  force  in 
public  action  also;  but  the  State  cannot  follow  the 
dialectic  to  this  point.  The  State  must  punish.  It  may 
and  does  exercise  clemency ;  but  clemency  can  be 
effective  only  as  following  upon  that  conviction  which 
is  the  essence  of  punishment,  and  which  involves  arrest 
and  trial — or  forced  discontinuity  of  action,  however 
brief.  The  State,  speaking  as  it  must  to  the  inner  in¬ 
tention  through  the  medium  of  deeds,  has  no  way  of 
distinguishing  a  clemency  prior  to  all  punishment  from 
a  meaningless  passivity.  Further,  since  the  criminal 
while  possibly  citizen,  is  also  possibly  rebel,  the  State 
must  recognize  both  possibilities.  The  State  must 
punish. 

Further — and  this  aspect  of  the  matter  has  not  been 
forgotten  in  theories  of  penology,  but  has  seldom  been 


PUNISHMENT 


287 


rightly  placed — the  criminal  is  not  the  only  one  who 
is  to  be  punished  for  his  crime.  We  have  said  that 
every  member  of  a  society  is  under  the  same  pressure ; 
We  may  now  say  that  every  member  is  under  the  same 
punishment.  The  only  justification  for  treating  the 
criminal  by  the  educative  method  of  punishment  is 
that  he  is,  after  all,  of  like  mind  with  the  rest  of  his 
group;  and  they,  in  turn,  are  of  like  passions  with 
himself.  It  was  this  which,  in  primitive  society,  made 
crime  a  common  menace,  calling  for  public,  and  not 
merely  for  individual  purification.  The  theory  that  the 
gods  must  he  propitiated  was  a  mode  of  expressing 
an  actual  condition.  For  in  all  minds,  and  not  in  a 
few  only,  the  goods  which  constitute  a  common  culture 
retain  their  persuasiveness  only  by  perpetual  contest 
with  the  superior  obviousness  of  the  material  goods 
and  the  direct  ways  thereto.  The  deed  of  the  unper¬ 
suaded  man,  painted  on  the  imagination  of  all  who 
know  of  it,  conspires  with  the  natural  gravitation  of 
the  human  will.  The  relatively  defenceless  and  vulner¬ 
able  fabric  of  the  necessary  good  has  been  attacked  in 
all  minds ;  the  plague  spot  which  appears  must  be  taken 
as  symptomatic.  A  white  slaver  appears  in  a  public 
tribunal,  and  unblushingly  expounds  his  occupation  as 
a  form  of  business;  and  as  I  read  his  testimony  his 
‘ point  of  view’  penetrates  farther  than  my  ears,  and 
I  must  take  thought  to  revive  the  sources  of  my  indig¬ 
nation.  ‘  ‘  When  thou  sawest  a  thief,  thou  consentedst 
with  him  and  hast  been  a  partaker  with  adulterers.  ’  9 
The  community  has  thus  a  work  to  do  which  is  not 
limited  to  the  person  of  the  criminal.  This  work  is 


288 


SOCIETY 


sometimes  spoken  of  as  ‘ 6  deterrent,  ’  ’ — and  so  it  is, 
but  this  is  a  partial  and  an  after-effect;  in  its  imme¬ 
diate  force  it  is  punitive , — it  is  the  share  of  the  entire 
community  in  the  suffering  and  purging  which  belong 
to  the  thoughts  of  crime.  It  is  not  that  the  criminal  is 
suffering  for  the  community ;  it  is  the  community  which 
must  suffer  for  and  with  him,  must  have  its  sympa¬ 
thetic  share  in  the  argument  of  his  punishment  because 
of  its  equally  sympathetic  share  in  his  crime.  Hence 
the  language  of  the  State  must  be  stern,  unmistakable, 
public,  and  awakening;  the  State  must  punish,  to  re¬ 
make  the  souls  of  all. 


II 

The  Dialectic  of  Punishment 

Dealing  with  crime  thus  involves  a  dilemma:  it  is 
necessary  to  provide  crime  with  its  argument;  yet  in 
doing  so,  society  provides  it  with  an  unintended  argu¬ 
ment  against  itself.  Whatever  is  defective  in  the  spirit 
of  a  community  will  show  most  clear  in  its  treatment 
of  crime,  whether  harsh,  malicious,  brutal,  sentimental, 
or  simply  callous.  Public  resentment  is  never  a  holy 
reaction,  unmixed  with  impatience,  contempt,  and  a 
desire  to  be  undisturbed  in  its  own  more  decorous  self¬ 
ishness.  The  man  who  is  caught  feels  through  the  net 
the  cunning  eyes  of  the  uncaught.  By  a  deep-wrought 
law  of  nature  he  attracts  the  worst  side  of  the  social 
temper  to  himself:  the  pursuer  of  crime  adopts  the 
arts  of  the  pursued,  and  becomes  like  him  in  quality 
and  habit.  It  is  hard  to  deal  with  evil  except  evilly. 
Even  expletives  of  condemnation  vulgarize  their  users : 


PUNISHMENT 


289 


one  who  employs  much  vituperative  language  becomes 
assimilated  to  the  images  he  habitually  invokes.  In  con¬ 
demning  the  vice  that  most  tempts  him,  the  hypocrite 
has  commonly  found  a  subtle  way  of  self-indulgence. 
The  extreme  hostility  provoked  by  crimes  of  sex  is  due 
in  part  to  the  participation  which  their  cognizance 
imposes,  and  to  the  sense  that  resistance  itself  has 
forced  an  unwilling  consciousness  upon  their  victims. 
As  administered  by  human  beings,  punishment  con¬ 
tains  a  self-defeating  element. 

The  history  of  criminal  law  shows  mankind  early 
aware  of  this  difficulty,  and  devising  various  ways  to 
meet  it.  Blood  vengeance,  which  speaks  in  the  name 
of  the  sacred  spirit  of  the  family,  is  an  advance  upon 
individual  vengeance.  Something  exalted  and  heroic 
may  enter  into  it;  adversaries  in  feud  may  recognize 
in  each  other  the  requirements  of  spirit  and  honor. 
Yet  the  deed  of  honor  fails  to  convince  the  family 
spirit  which  is  its  victim;  it  simply  transfers  the  neces¬ 
sity  of  honor  to  the  alternate  member  of  the  feud, 
whom  it  has  treated  as  an  equal.  Hence  it  fails  to 
punish.  And  it  cannot  punish,  unless  it  can  escape  from 
its  simple  opposition  and  equality  into  a  region  in¬ 
clusive  of  both  members  and  their  passions,  a  region 
in  which  it  can  appeal  to  the  criminal  as  endowed  with 
a  right  not  alone  to  judge  and  punish,  but  to  close  the 
argument  by  restoring  the  disturbed  status. 

Such  a  region  was  provided,  by  a  true  social  instinct, 
in  the  ancient  places  of  asylum,  which  were  not  merely 
places  secured  from  violence,  but  also  places  whose 
sanctity  could  overawe  the  minds  and  passions  of  both 


290 


SOCIETY 


accuser  and  accused.  And  that  sanctity  to  which  the 
culprit  might  run  for  protection,  having  shown  itself 
so  far  beneficent  to  him,  would  he  more  nearly  con¬ 
vincing  in  its  condemnation.  The  issue  of  such  an  in¬ 
terval  of  security,  with  the  advantage  perhaps  of  the 
passionless  judgment  of  the  guardians  of  the  place, 
would  partake  of  the  nature  of  a  true  punishment. 

But  neither  the  interposition  of  asylum,  nor  of  judg¬ 
ment,  nor  of  ordeal,  nor  of  more  rational  trial  pro¬ 
cedure,2  could  offer  the  convicted  person  much  hope 
of  restoration,  at  least  as  an  intact  individual,  if  given 
over  at  last  to  the  mercies  of  his  accuser.  To  this  extent, 
another  device,  that  of  payment  or  compensation,  to 
he  accepted  in  lieu  of  death  or  mutilation,  more  nearly 
conveyed  the  meaning  of  punishment.  It  also  tended  to 
temper  by  reflection  the  passion  of  revenge;  hut  this 
time  by  a  calculating  reflection  instead  of  a  dominating 
religious  dread.  The  spark  of  valid  resentment  was 
certain  to  he  somewhat  diluted  in  the  desire  of  gain, 
and  most  patently  to  the  accused,  whether  the  payment 
was  taken  over  by  the  accuser,  or  appropriated  by  the 
common  or  lordly  purse.  The  demand  for  a  preliminary 
confession  and  apology,  while  it  mitigated  the  venality 
of  the  transaction  and  made  the  criminal  a  party  to 
his  own  condemnation,  hardly  secured  the  sincerity  of 
the  conviction. 

The  experience  of  the  Greeks,  embodied  in  their 
legends,  well  shows  the  logic  of  the  situation  and 

2  It  must  be  remembered  that  criminal  procedure  becomes  a  part  of 
punishment  inasmuch  as  it  determines  the  meaning  and  temper  of  the 
punishment.  It  is  the  subject  and  verb  of  the  ‘  sentence.  ’ 


PUNISHMENT 


291 


carries  the  problem  a  step  farther  toward  solution. 
The  iniquity  of  vengeance  would  appear  at  its  height 
when  crime  broke  out  within  the  family,  and  so  in¬ 
volved  the  curse  of  repeated  family  crime,  such  a  curse 
as  befell  the  ill-fated  house  of  Atreus  of  Argos.  Atreus, 
the  wronged  husband  (according  to  the  version  of 
JEschylus),  had  no  choice  but  to  impose  banishment 
upon  his  brother  Thyestes.  But  Thyestes,  taking  refuge 
in  the  city  sanctuary,  keeps  alive  by  his  presence  the 
element  of  rancor  in  Atreus;  so  that  at  last  the  out¬ 
raged  spirit  of  family  honor  vents  itself  in  a  counter- 
outrage  upon  the  remaining  spark  of  sacred  feeling 
in  the  outcast  himself,  his  affection  as  a  father  betrayed 
into  eating  the  flesh  of  his  slain  children.  Thus  Atreus, 
in  punishing,  injures  that  which  in  punishing  he  seeks 
to  preserve ;  and  so  with  each  new  step  in  the  tragic 
history.  Orestes  alone,  driven  rather  by  the  command 
of  Apollo  than  by  personal  bitterness  to  the  matricide 
which  avenges  his  father,  seems  to  have  acquired  an 
honesty  of  spirit  that  might  reconcile  Clytemnestra  to 
her  death.  But  the  deed  of  vengeance  is  greater  than 
his  consciousness  of  it;  its  objective  impiety  he  cannot 
overcome  in  an  adequate  sense  of  its  divine  necessity ; 
he,  too,  must  be  tormented  by  the  Furies.  He  has  not 
been  sufficiently  inspired  to  convince  the  guilty  woman, 
hence  his  attempt  at  punishment  is  not  free  from  guilt. 
Apollo,  apparently  helpless,  discharges  his  share  of 
responsibility  by  appeal  to  the  guardian  goddess  of  a 
very  human  civilization,  Pallas  Athene.  And  she  in 
turn,  finding  the  case  “too  passionate  for  a  goddess/ ’ 
still  further  humanizes  the  solution  by  instituting  the 


292 


SOCIETY 


court  of  citizens,  the  court  of  the  Areopagus,  whose 
first  work  will  be  the  judgment  of  Orestes.  Judging  as 
men,  however,  they  can  but  find  both  for  him  and 
against  him:  no  act  of  human  justice  can  solve  the 
riddle  and  discharge  the  Furies  from  their  work.  It 
is  Athene  who  must  turn  the  scale, — and  apparently 
by  an  arbitrary  touch,  whose  meaning  remains  a 
mystery  even  in  the  work  of  .ZEschylus.  She  neither 
sanctions  the  act  of  Orestes  nor  condemns  it;  she  re¬ 
gards  it — so  I  interpret  the  legend — as  an  incident 
of  a  faulty  social  structure  from  which  no  perfect  solu¬ 
tions  can  come.  Orestes  has  the  benefit  of  the  historic 
chance  that  he  stands  on  the  threshold  of  a  new  order, 
which  no  merit  of  his  could  have  created.  And  what 
is  the  principle  of  this  new  order?  It  is  the  dissolving 
of  the  family  group,  within  which  all  passions  are  so 
strained  that  no  guiltless  punishment  is  possible,  in 
the  political  community.  Under  the  auspices  of  its 
divine  protector,  this  community  can  bring  a  perfect 
passionlessness  into  the  judgment  and  punishment  of 
crime,  and  purge  the  process  of  the  barbarism  of  per¬ 
sonal  impulse.  The  wrong  done  to  the  individual,  and 
to  the  family,  is  sunk  in  the  wrong  done  to  the  city- 
state  ;  and  the  city  acts  by  reason  without  wrath.  The 
Furies  are  therefore  freed  from  their  mission  and  from 
their  character ;  they  become  henceforth  the  ‘ ‘  gracious 
goddesses,”  enshrined  within  the  precincts  of  Athene’s 
sacred  hill.  Punishment  at  the  hands  of  the  State  unites 
the  solemnity  and  refuge  of  the  sanctuary  with  the 
rationality  of  measure.  Ought  it  not  to  convince  the 
criminal,  and  so  solve  the  problem? 


PUNISHMENT 


293 


Our  solutions  are  not  fundamentally  different  from 
those  of  the  Greeks;  and  our  experience  in  view  of 
these  historic  experiments  may  reveal  the  defect  of 
its  principle.  The  great  success  of  this  political  process 
is  that  it  localizes  the  hurt ,  saving  the  accuser  from  a 
further  crime;  it  has  shown  no  great  power  to  per¬ 
suade  the  criminal.  Indeed,  the  impetus  of  the  accuser’s 
resentment  is  so  far  checked  that  the  accused  seldom 
feels  in  public  custody  the  element  of  asylum  which 
might  provoke  in  him  some  sense  of  approval  toward 
the  auspices  which  judge  him.  Perhaps  this  resentment 
is  too  far  impersonalized.  Wherever  feeling  runs  high, 
there  is  still  a  tendency  to  evade  the  circuit  through 
the  public  court,  and  to  appeal  to  the  “unwritten  law” 
— which  means  the  primitive  procedure — or  to  the  duel, 
or  to  the  summary  process  of  Judge  Lynch.  The  theory 
seems  to  he  that  the  culprit  should  not  he  spared  the 
sting  of  feeling.  The  practice  is  at  odds  with  the  theory, 
because  conviction  cannot  be  produced  in  a  medium  of 
either  fear  or  pride.  But  the  criticism  points  in  the 
right  direction :  the  State  has  cut  away  too  much  of  the 
meaning  of  ancient  law :  it  is  passionless  without  spirit ; 
in  becoming  official  it  has  lost  the  co-operation  of  the 
presiding  goddess.  The  family  could  not  be  official: 
hence  it  must  give  way  to  the  State.  But  in  losing  the 
solemn  concern  of  the  spirit  of  the  family  in  the  apa¬ 
thetic  equanimity  of  Pallas,  that  spark  of  feeling  has 
been  eliminated  which  alone  can  positively  persuade. 

The  State  cannot  import  feeling  into  its  procedure ; 
though  in  its  own  dignity,  if  it  has  any,  it  may  make 
contact  with  the  sources  of  feeling.  The  State  must 


294 


SOCIETY 


use  the  language  of  the  external  deed.  If  this  deed  is 
to  become  an  argument,  it  must  be  interpreted  by  the 
criminal  himself ;  and  he  will  so  interpret  it  only  if  he 
sees  in  it  the  deed  of  an  august  beneficence  such  as 
commands  his  reverence  as  well  as  his  fear.  He  must 
see  it  as  the  deed  of  an  ideal  social  order  not  wholly 
identical  with  the  order  in  which  he  finds  himself  en¬ 
tangled.  What  the  State  alone  cannot  command  must 
be  supplied  by  those  free  elements  of  society  which  con¬ 
tinue  the  motives  of  the  ancient  family  bond  and  the 
place  of  refuge.3  It  is  only  through  a  pervading  activity 
of  a  consciousness  such  as  religion  in  times  past  has 
called  out  in  men,  both  accuser  and  accused,  and  work¬ 
ing  in  conjunction  with  the  official  procedure  of  the 
State,  that  a  genuine  punishment,  and  hence  a  genuine 
restoration,  can  be  accomplished. 

Thus  in  the  negative  work  of  punishment  as  in  the 
positive  work  of  education,  society  in  remaking  human 
nature  seems  to  depend,  for  the  last  quasi-miraculous 
touch  of  efficiency  without  which  the  rest  of  its  work 
has  the  ring  of  hollowness  and  sham,  upon  an  agency 
or  agencies  beyond  its  own  borders.  To  the  quest  of 
these  ulterior  agencies  of  remaking  we  must  now  turn. 

3  Attempts  are  made  to  provide  this  missing  element  by  personal 
indulgence  as  a  mitigation  of  punishment,  in  the  hope  of  humoring 
men  back  into  good  nature.  This  is  a  false  hope,  not  in  what  it  adds, 
but  in  what  it  lets  go.  The  test  of  success  is  that  in  the  midst  of  punish¬ 
ment,  the  State  itself  (and  not  an  individual  warden)  commands  respect 
and  good-will. 


PART  VI 


ART  AND  RELIGION 


CHAPTER  XXXIII 


VOX  DEI 

IN  the  transforming  of  man,  society  intends  to  civi¬ 
lize  him,  religion  to  save  him.  In  these  terms  there 
is  a  suggestion  that  the  work  of  society  is  more  or  less 
superficial,  that  of  religion  more  radical  and  thorough. 
Man  conforms  his  mind  and  habits  to  social  require¬ 
ments  and  becomes  ‘ polite’:  he  submits  his  soul  to  re¬ 
ligion  and  becomes  ‘holy.’ 

But  there  is  reason  to  question  whether  this  tradi¬ 
tional  distinction  can  be  maintained ;  or  whether  there 
is  any  legitimate  distinction  at  all  between  the  work 
of  society  and  the  work  of  religion  on  human  nature. 
To  make  man  a  social  being,  to  lead  him  out  of  his 
egoism  and  barbarity  into  the  liberal  interpretation 
of  his  interests  afforded  by  civic  life  and  its  destinies, 
is  not  this  to  make  him  a  religious  being  in  the  only 
sense  of  religion  that  has  valid  meaning  ? 

In  the  early  days  of  human  organization,  the  dis¬ 
tinction  between  the  social  and  the  religious  could  not 
have  been  drawn,  not  because  all  religion  was  social, 
but  because  all  social  requirement  was  religious.  The 
setting-up  of  ideals,  the  defining  of  customs,  the  giving 
of  laws  were  understood  as  the  voice  of  God  to  the 
people.  Vox  populi  had  no  other  existence  than  in  vox 
Dei.  If  the  interests  of  society  were  at  all  divergent 
from  those  of  religion,  there  was  little  opportunity  to 


298 


AET  AND  EELIGION 


discover  the  fact :  for  when  the  ordering  of  life  is  singly 
and  simply  from  above,  there  is  no  comparison  of 
standards,  and  hence  no  rebellion  in  the  name  of  a 
social  value. 

But  the  time  was  bound  to  come  when  the  two  rules, 
the  sacred  and  the  secular,  should  fall  into  contrast, 
if  only  because  of  their  diverse  methods  of  origin,  the 
sacred  relatively  a  priori ,  the  secular  relatively  em¬ 
pirical  and  pragmatic.  And  when  this  opposition  has 
occurred,  history  seems  to  show  that  the  destiny  of  the 
sacred  is  to  yield  to  the  secular.  Tabus  accumulated 
beyond  endurance;  were  long  protected  by  faith  and 
fear;  but  they  have  been  swept  away.  Holy  men  fell 
into  the  way  of  announcing  counsels  of  perfection  such 
as  would  mutilate  or  destroy  human  nature, — the 
sacred  books  are  full  of  such  counsels :  for  these,  prac¬ 
tice  provided  an  interpretation,  such  as  all  laws  need ; 
and  the  interpretation  quietly  superseded  the  an¬ 
nounced  ideal.  The  establishments  and  ordinances  of 
religion  became  extremely  costly  to  society,  in  men  and 
time  and  treasure  abstracted  from  social  use,  and  not 
infrequently,  too,  in  moral  integrity:  neither  social 
utility  nor  social  ethics  would  sanction  many  ancient 
forms  of  sacrifice.  But  the  race  has  believed  in  its  social 
standards  as  against  the  oracles,  and  these  extrava¬ 
gances  of  religious  requirement  have  dwindled  or  dis¬ 
appeared.  To-day  it  is  frequently  asserted  by  the  ex¬ 
ponents  of  religion  themselves  that  our  best  insight 
into  the  will  of  God  is  the  verifiable  welfare  of  society. 
Our  religion  seems  to  become,  in  effect  if  not  in  name, 
the  religion  of  humanity. 


VOX  DEI 


299 


Thus  the  question  has  become  acute  whether  the 
reference  to  God  is  any  longer  significant.  Is  it  more 
than  an  imaginative  widening  of  the  horizon  under 
which  the  same  acts  and  qualities  are  required,  a  chang¬ 
ing  of  names,  as  from  4 goodness ’  to  ‘holiness/  or  from 
‘crime’  to  ‘sin’?  The  tendency  of  history  is  unmistak¬ 
able.  From  “The  voice  of  God  is  the  voice  of  the 
people”  we  have  come  to  “The  voice  of  the  people  is 
the  voice  of  God”;  and  it  may  well  be  that  the 
time  has  come  to  drop  the  “voice  of  God”  as  otiose, 
frankly  acknowdedging  our  final  insight  into  human 
standards  as  “from  below,”  i.e.,  from  experience,  so¬ 
cially  transmitted.  If  we  any  longer  maintain  a  sepa¬ 
rate  place  for  religion  in  the  work  of  transforming 
human  instinct,  the  burden  of  proof  is  upon  us. 

I  accept  the  burden.  And  I  begin  by  pointing  out 
an  error  in  the  logic  of  the  argument  we  have  just 
reviewed. 

The  course  of  history  seemed  to  show  that  the  will 
of  God  has  tended  to  coincide  with  the  weal  of  society ; 
the  inference  was  that  the  weal  of  society  is  the  inde¬ 
pendent  fact,  and  hence  the  only  fact  that  need  be 
considered.  The  inference  is  hasty.  We  may  accept  the 
proposition,  Nothing  contrary  to  the  welfare  of  society 
can  be  accepted  as  the  will  of  God.  But  the  postulate 
that  A  must  not  clash  with  B  does  not  in  the  least  in¬ 
form  me  what  A  is.  I  must  plan  my  house  so  as  not  to 
destroy  the  trees  on  my  lot:  this  condition  does  not 
supply  me  the  plan  of  my  house — would  it  did ! 
Religion  must  not  tear  down  social  values : — this  condi- 


300 


AET  AND  RELIGION 


tion  does  not  supply  me  with  a  religion.  What  history 
suggests,  at  most,  is  that  the  welfare  of  society  has  a 
negative  or  critical  bearing  on  the  interpretation  of 
the  religious  standard.  We  may  be  negative  prag¬ 
matists  in  the  matter.1  But  there  is  not  the  slightest 
evidence,  so  far,  that  the  will  of  God  is  deducible  from 
the  good  of  society  as  an  independent  fact. 

And  there  is  a  large  volume  of  evidence  to  the  con¬ 
trary.  Let  us  make  the  questionable  admission  that  we 
know  and  can  define  what  social  utility  is;  it  is  still 
true  that  the  socially  useful  has  never  been  reached 
by  directly  aiming  at  it,  but  has  always  come  as  a 
result  of  aiming  at  something  else,  as  an  independent 
object.  Social  cohesion,  loyalty,  lawfulness,  are  dispo¬ 
sitions  upon  which  every  social  structure  depends,  but 
which  society  cannot  directly  produce.  Already  in  the 
speculations  of  Plato  and  Aristotle  we  find  a  deep 
anxiety  as  to  what  education,  what  myth,  what  music, 
what  lie  if  need  be,  will  be  likely  to  generate  the  spirit 
from  which  socially  useful  behavior  would  naturally 
follow.  Arguing  from  history,  it  looks  rather  as  if  there 
could  be  no  social  good,  unless  there  is  something  more 
than  social  good,  as  a  primary  object  of  pursuit. 

In  point  of  fact,  society  has  always  had  its  religion 
in  some  form, — a  principle  of  devotion  which  has  per¬ 
vaded  the  social  tissue,  acting  more  or  less  like  an 
enzyme  in  furnishing  energy  and  loyalty  at  points 
needing  support.  Law-abiding  behavior  could  not  be 
reached  by  the  separate  attention  of  each  citizen  to 

1  For  the  meaning  of  the  phrase  1  negative  pragmatism  ’  see  my  book, 
The  Meaning  of  God ,  preface,  pp.  xiii  f. 


VOX  DEI 


301 


each  law :  it  has  to  be  reached  for  the  most  part  through 
a  disposition  which  of  its  own  motion  is  “the  fulfilling 
of  the  law,”  or  the  major  part  of  the  law.  The  man  who 
measures  each  step  by  the  law  is  not  the  good  citizen : 
he  who  watches  the  law,  the  law  needs  to  watch.  There 
is  a  “spirit  of  the  laws,”  something  which  one  might 
call  a  moral  substance,  which  shows  itself  in  a  spon¬ 
taneous  faith  in  current  institutions  and  ideals  and  fel¬ 
low  citizens,  a  willingness  to  serve  them  and  work  with 
them,  a  spirit  which  society  can  neither  give  nor  take 
away,  and  yet  without  which  there  is  no  society.2 

1  prefer  to  describe  this  spirit  as  a  moral  substance, 
because  when  we  look  into  it  more  closely  it  is  not 

2  Mr.  Graham  Wallas  has  shown,  in  a  fascinating  study,  how  the 
practical  art  of  politics  is  concerned  with  what  is  instinctive  and  emo¬ 
tional,  not  alone  with  what  is  reasonable  or  reasoned.  He  regards  it 
as  somewhat  ominous  that  this  art  betakes  itself  so  frankly  to  ‘  ‘exploit¬ 
ing  the  irrational  elements  of  human  nature  which  have  hitherto  been 
the  trade  secret  of  the  elderly  and  disillusioned  ’ ’  ( Human  Nature  in 
Politics,  p.  177).  The  chief  peril,  as  I  see  it,  is  not  that  political  mana¬ 
gers  will  address  themselves  to  the  unreasoned,  but  that  they  will  make 
a  wrong  guess  as  to  the  nature  of  the  unreasoned  sentiments  they  have 
to  deal  with.  When  one  leaves  the  rigorous  path  of  influencing  the  will 
of  one’s  fellows  by  argument  alone,  everything  depends  on  what  passions 
one  attributes  to  them.  If  with  Bolingbroke  (to  use  Mr.  Wallas’  illus¬ 
trations)  one  fancies  himself  dealing  with  ‘that  staring,  timid  creature, 
man,  ’  the  result  is  likely  to  be  supercilious  and  deceptive  political  action. 
But  if  with  Disraeli  one  realizes  that  ‘Man  is  only  truly  great  when  he 
acts  from  the  passions,  never  irresistible  but  when  he  appeals  to  the 
imagination,’  there  is  room  at  least  for  a  generous  interpretation  of  the 
unreasoned  motive.  Benjamin  Kidd  seems  to  have  been  near  the  ground 
of  experience  in  judging  that  the  unreasoned  element  in  politics,  in  its 
last  analysis,  is  a  loyalty  of  religious  character.  The  ebullition  of 
national  feeling  at  the  outbreak  of  the  war  showed,  especially  in  France, 
how  politics  in  times  of  public  stress  tends  to  avow  a  lurking  religious 
ingredient,  while  patriotism  tends  to  coincide  for  the  moment  with 
religion. 


302 


ART  AND  RELIGION 


simply  a  subjective  temper  but  also  a  world  of  objects 
engaging  each  individual’s  interest  and  will  in  logical 
independence  of  bis  social  entanglements;  and  in  this 
world  of  objects  we  recognize  the  accumulated  goods 
of  both  religion  and  art.  These  goods  do  not  arise  apart 
from  social  conditions,  and  are  commonly  reckoned  as 
social  products;  but  they  appeal  to  the  individual  as 
an  independently  appreciating  being,  as  an  original 
self.  Because  this  substance  has  always  pervaded  so¬ 
ciety,  its  real  relation  to  society  is  obscured;  and  an 
attempt  to  define  society  apart  from  it  would  be  felt  as 
a  mutilation  of  society.  But  this  circumstance  only 
makes  stronger  the  contention  that  social  good,  defined 
apart  from  religion,  is  not  self-sufficient.  And  I  shall 
try  to  indicate  a  method  of  comparing  the  relative 
functions  of  each  which  will  admit  the  comparison  with 
justice  to  both  sides. 

It  is  characteristic  of  the  development  of  human 
beings  that  the  will  to  power  tends  to  assume  from  time 
to  time  the  character  of  some  leading  interest,  which 
becomes  the  center  of  values  for  the  whole  life.  This 
leading  interest  may  rise  to  the  level  of  a  passion.  In 
a  boy’s  growth  to  maturity  we  can  trace  a  series  of 
these  absorbing  concerns,  seldom  coincident  with  the 
tasks  set  for  him  by  his  elders,  but  merging  at  last 
(generally  speaking)  in  an  ‘ ambition’  which  at  some 
time  or  other  struggles  for  supremacy  with  a  personal 
affection.  To  these  two  major  passions,  ambition  and 
love,  correspond  two  major  groups  of  institutions, 
those  of  the  public  order  and  those  of  the  private  order, 


VOX  DEI 


303 


as  we  shall  name  them.  These  together  constitute  ‘so¬ 
ciety’  in  so  far  as  society  has  a  definable  entity  apart 
from  religion  and  art. 

Now  what  society  does  for  human  nature  depends 
on  how  completely  it  can  satisfy  the  individual  will. 
A  man  can  be  said  to  be  saved  (to  adopt  the  religious 
terminology  for  the  sake  of  our  comparison)  not  alone 
when  he  is  reclaimed  from  rebellion  or  criminality; 
he  is  saved  in  so  far  as  he  is  not  wasted ,  in  so  far  as  the 
human  material  in  him  gets  a  chance  at  self-expression 
and  utilization.  In  this  sense  the  question  for  society 
is  how  much  of  each  member  it  can  save,  not  merely 
how  many  it  can  preserve  from  disaffection  and 
rebellion. 

Putting  the  question  in  this  way,  it  is  clear  that  so¬ 
ciety  never  does  save  the  whole  man.  In  general,  society 
saves,  or  conserves,  as  much  of  a  man  as  can ,  at 
any  time,  find  a  valuation.  It  saves  as  much  as  it  knows 
how  to  use  or  esteem.  The  remainder  is  wasted.  And  it 
may  easily  be  that  the  better  the  case  any  set  of  institu¬ 
tions  can  make  out  for  itself  as  a  whole,  the  worse  the 
plight  of  that  portion  of  human  nature  (if  there  is  such 
a  portion)  which  it  cannot  satisfy,  because  it  does  not 
understand. 

We  shall  attempt  to  estimate  what  part  of  human 
nature  can  be  thus  ‘saved’  by  the  public  and  the  private 
orders,  at  their  best. 


CHAPTER  XXXIY 


THE  PUBLIC  ORDER  AND  THE  PRIVATE  ORDER 

•v 

POLITICAL  and  economic  institutions  we  have 
recognized  as  the  particular  playground  and  home 
of  the  will  to  power,  so  far  transformed  that  the  suc¬ 
cess  of  one  does  not  necessarily  mean  the  weakness  or 
defeat  of  another.  These  institutions  may  be  de¬ 
scribed  as  the  ‘ public  order’;  and  in  this  form,  the  will 
to  power  may  become  the  passion  of  ‘ ambition.’  To 
realize  his  ambition  an  individual  must  market  his 
talents,  i.e.,  put  them  into  a  form  in  which  they  serve 
other  men,  or  seem  to  do  so.  Hence  just  in  so  far  as  a 
man  can  be  summed  up  in  his  marketable  talents,  he 
can  find  satisfaction  in  the  public  order. 

The  world  grows  catholic  in  its  power  of  apprecia¬ 
tion  ;  a  greater  variety  of  talent  finds  its  market.  The 
man  who  to-day  may  be  a  poet — and  make  a  living  by 
it — might  once  have  been  by  necessity  a  minstrel,  a 
priest,  or  a  cobbler:  the  public  order  has  not  always 
had  a  place  for  poets.  Even  now,  the  public  judgment 
of  beauty  is  so  far  uncertain,  and  therefore  imitative, 
that  the  artist  risks  the  fate  of  being  either  neglected 
or  lionized;  there  is  not  as  yet  a  firm,  discriminating, 
and  sober  estimation  of  his  worth.  Apart  from  those 
who  despising  the  public  refuse  to  join  to  their  art 
the  effort  to  be  intelligible  (I  am  not  speaking  of  that 


THE  PUBLIC  OEDEB  AND  THE  PKIYATE  OKDEB  305 

vulgar  inversion  of  motive  which  seeks  advertisement 
in  conspicuous  violence  to  common  standards),  there 
are  presumably  always  a  number  of  lost  poets, 
prophets,  philosophers  “of  whom  the  world  was  not 
worthy” :  in  the  nature  of  the  case,  their  existence  must 
be  conjectural.  It  was  not  until  Greek  times  that  the 
man  whose  gift  for  pure  science  was  not  conjoined 
either  with  religious  inspiration  or  an  inherited  fortune 
could  find  a  footing :  and  even  now,  for  the  most  part, 
he  must  unite  this  gift  with  the  interest,  or  at  least  the 
occupation,  of  teaching, — usually  a  natural  and  most 
helpful  union,  sometimes  a  disastrous  one. 

Individuals  may  still  go  astray;  but  at  least  the  class 
has  come  to  its  own.  We  have  names  for  ‘poet,’  1 artist,’ 
and  the  others ;  we  know  the  type  of  service,  and  value 
it;  almost  we  have  conventionalized  the  hardship  and 
poverty  once  associated  with  it,  as  a  bungling  penance. 
But  what  of  the  services  for  which  as  yet  no  category 
exists?  Is  it  clear,  a  priori ,  that  I  must  fit  into  any  of 
these  traditional  rubrics,  “doctor,  lawyer,  merchant, 
chief”?  If  none  of  these  is  tempting,  the  public  order 
still  bids  me  choose; — or  invent  and  persuade.  The 
category  itself  becomes  something  of  a  menace  through 
the  type  it  attracts,  a  type  which  may  repel  the  finest 
quality  in  its  own  kind.  Francis  Thompson  was  a  poet 
by  nature,  if  ever  there  was  a  poet;  yet  not  even  his 
own  self-consciousness  could  find  its  rightful  certainty 
and  pride  until  the  many  judgments  and  pressures  of 
the  world  had  harried  him  into  a  course  of  slow  self- 
destruction.  The  marketable  man  is  never  the  complete 


306 


AET  AND  EELIGION 


man  in  his  uniqueness ;  and  conversely  the  whole  man 
is  never  marketable. 

But  where  the  public  order  thus  largely  fails,  the 
private  order  wins  a  measure  of  success.  The  private 
order  comprises  the  institution  of  the  family  with  the 
quasi-institutions  of  friendship,  amusement,  and  so¬ 
ciety  in  the  specific  sense.  Here  it  is  anything  but  a 
man  ’s  market-value  that  determines  his  survival.  He  is 
valued  as  much  for  what  he  cannot  express  as  for  what 
he  can.  It  is  the  ‘ pilgrim  soul,’  unarrived,  that  is  per¬ 
ceived  and  esteemed.  The  private  order  has  its  domi¬ 
nant  passion ;  it  attempts  to  satisfy  the  whole  man  by 
satisfying  his  sociability — or,  more  particularly,  his 
love.  The  instinct  we  call  love,  whether  in  its  special  or 
more  general  forms,  is  manifested  in  a  craving  which 
relates  precisely  to  this  unexpressed,  or  ‘  subconscious  ’ 
region  of  the  will.  Its  language  is  the  language  of 
signs  and  symbols  rather  than  of  words ;  and  where  it 
adopts  words,  it  imposes  on  them,  through  poetry,  the 
character  of  symbols,  with  the  task  of  carrying  un¬ 
reachable  meanings. 

This  is  the  interpretation  which  society  puts  upon 
the  instincts  of  sex  and  parenthood.  What  love  wants 
is  a  mutuality  of  life  in  which  each  appreciates  in  the 
other  what  he  in  substance  is,  rather  than  what  he  does. 

Thus  the  private  order  is  adapted  to  save  much  that 
is  lost  in  the  public  order.  As  the  self  of  immediate 
expression  can  reveal  more  than  is  seen  in  the  self  of 
marketable  technical  expression,  love  does  not  make 
its  judgment  or  its  choices  primarily  from  what  it  finds 
in  the  sphere  of  work ;  it  looks  to  the  self  of  play,  of  art, 


THE  PUBLIC  ORDER  AND  THE  PRIVATE  ORDER  307 

of  bodily  beauty,  of  manner  and  carriage,  emotion,  as¬ 
piration,  religious  feeling.  In  the  economic  virtues,  the 
ability  to  endure  hardship  and  to  use  common  sense, 
love  is  not  unconcerned;  negatively  speaking,  the  be¬ 
loved  person  must  not  fall  below  the  average  standard 
of  prudence,  competitive  spirit,  persuasiveness,  effi¬ 
ciency.  For  these  are  essential  parts  of  the  definition 
of  a  human  being;  they  are,  like  the  courage  expected 
by  chivalry,  a  test  of  the  quality  of  the  self  of  senti¬ 
ment.  It  is  for  this  reason  that  love  must  be  i  practical, ’ 
and  takes  ambition  itself  under  its  control:  but  these 
things  have  no  part  in  defining  the  principle  of  selection 
itself.  The  family  envisages  the  public  relations  of  its 
members  within  its  own  inclusive  understanding  of 
them ;  it  presupposes  the  results  of  their  activity  there ; 
it  uses  these  results.  But  it  subordinates  them  to  what  it 
alone  can  see.  So  far,  the  family  is  more  inclusive,  more 
satisfying  to  human  nature,  and  in  this  sense  greater 
than  the  State,  together  with  all  the  professional  and 
industrial  groups  or  guilds  within  it  or  beyond  it. 

But  it  is  also  less  than  the  State,  in  so  far  as  the 
public  order  remains  to  it  a  mystery.  The  family  is 
unable  wholly  to  follow  in  thought  the  self  that  is  valid 
in  the  public  order,  and  estimate  its  achievements.  The 
man  who  goes  to  work,  goes  ‘ out,’ — and  into  another 
sphere  of  thoughts  and  standards.  What  the  family 
grasps  and  uses  of  that  self  is  its  total  achievement, 
not  the  method  and  articulation  of  its  work.  It  is  some¬ 
times,  in  the  complexer  activities,  unable  to  estimate 
even  the  moral  quality  of  that  public  person ;  we  have 
grown  used  to  the  picture  of  the  crook  who  remains 


308 


ART  AND  RELIGION 


the  moral  hero  of  his  family  circle  and  perhaps  of  his 
friends  also.  It  tends  to  make  its  own  loyalties  and 
amenities  the  measure  of  the  whole  character. 

Hence  the  public  order  sets  up  counter  claims;  and 
requires  that  all  love  shall  show  its  value  for  ambition 
or  public  service.  It  has  its  opinion  of  the  over-domesti¬ 
cated  man.  The  State  has  allowed  the  family  its  great 
privacy  and  subconscious  development,  less  because  of 
the  satisfaction  its  members  found  there,  than  because 
of  the  fact,  noted  by  Aristotle,  that  the  strength  of  the 
private  relation  is  a  measure  af  the  possible  strength 
of  the  public  interest,  and  that  private  intercourse 
brings  certain  necessary  contributions  to  the  life  of  the 
State. 

The  direct  question:  Which  is  your  more  real  self, 
that  of  the  public  or  that  of  the  private  order?  most 
persons  would  find  it  hard  to  answer.  It  may  be  that 
the  sexes  differ  in  their  natural  finding  of  the  dominat¬ 
ing  order.  But  for  both  men  and  women,  both  orders 
are  necessary  to  a  complete  personality,  and  in  the 
arrangements  of  life,  each  order,  and  each  passion, 
takes  its  turn  at  hegemony.  The  honors  are  divided  by 
alternation,  and  not  by  a  disjunctive  choice. 

But  this  solution  by  alternation  is  not  a  solution  of 
the  psychological  problem :  neither  order  is  capable  of 
including  the  other, — are  both  together,  in  their  alter¬ 
nation,  capable  of  freeing  the  entire  man? 


CHAPTER  XXXV 


SOCIETY  AND  BEYOND  SOCIETY 

EVERYONE’S  daily  program  falls  into  alterna¬ 
tion  between  the  public  and  the  private  order.  This 
is  not  a  matter  of  convenience  alone:  it  is  a  psycho¬ 
logical  necessity.  And  the  necessity  is  more  than  a  need 
of  supplementation.  It  is  true  that  each  order  does, 
in  the  way  we  have  described,  compensate  the  indi¬ 
vidual  person  for  the  lacks  of  the  other  order,  and 
forms  a  refuge  from  it.  The  life  of  the  family  is  narrow, 
over-personal,  and  subjective,  and  creates  a  need  which 
the  public  activity  in  some  measure  appeases.  The 
public  order  is  hard,  over-impersonal,  mechanical, 
superficial,  relying  overmuch  on  the  sufficiency  of  ana¬ 
lytical  intelligence:  it  drives  back  to  more  complete 
and  intimate  realities.  But  the  relations  between  the 
two  orders  are  deeper  than  this  of  supplementation. 
For  neither,  without  the  other,  can  successfully  do  even 
its  own  part.  Each  to  some  extent  presupposes  the 
other, — a  fact  which  is  not  wholly  obvious,  but  which 
can  be  made  evident  by  considering  what  each  order 
requires. 

The  tendency  at  present  is  to  distinguish  sharply 
between  a  man’s  capacity  for  marketable  service  and 
his  private  life.  It  is  in  the  public  order  that  the  maxim, 
Business  is  business,  holds  good :  we  ask  what  you  can 
do,  and  if  you  do  that  well  we  ask  no  further  questions, 


310 


AET  AND  RELIGION 


and  assume  no  further  responsibilities.  There  is  a  great 
relief  and  freedom  in  this ;  ‘ ‘  toleration ’  y  wins  more  by 
it  than  by  any  other  drift  of  the  time.  Because  of  the 
cash-nexus,  with  its  impersonality,  a  man  may  now 
sell  his  labor,  as  Arnold  Toynbee  pointed  out,  without 
selling  himself.  Yet  in  all  this  it  is  not  ignored,  but 
assumed  as  understood,  that  the  success  of  any  man’s 
service  depends  on  a  state  of  mind  which  the  private 
order  keeps  alive .  I  do  not  mean  simply  recreation  and 
rest,  though  this  is  part  of  it :  I  mean  confidence,  inde¬ 
pendence,  and  originality  of  mind.  What  any  man 
brings  to  market  is  something  which  he,  as  a  total  and 
responsible  agent,  can  perform;  he  brings  his  inven¬ 
tiveness  and  powers  of  discretion.  The  least  of  public 
servants  is  expected  to  exercise  a  degree  of  mother- 
wit.  If  at  any  moment  the  motive  force  of  the  public 
order  should  be  reduced  to  the  momentum  of  its  own 
definitions,  its  wheels  would  stop.1  It  is  an  undefined 
contribution,  the  life  conferred  on  the  mechanism,  in¬ 
cluding  the  power  of  seeing  things  whole  and  judging 
them  soundly,  which,  on  the  psychical  side  of  the  ac¬ 
count,  is  exhausted  in  the  course  of  a  day’s  work:  and 
it  is  this  which  the  private  order  must  be  counted  on  to 
restore.  Success  in  the  public  order  presupposes  a  state 
of  mind  given  by  the  private  order. 

But  does  success  within  the  private  order  presup¬ 
pose  a  state  of  mind  given  in  turn  by  the  public  order  ? 

1 1  am  told  that  syndicalism  in  France  and  Italy  knows  a  mode  of 
strike  in  which,  instead  of  refusing  to  obey  rules,  all  rules  are  literally 
obeyed, — and  no  more:  the  employer,  it  may  be  the  government,  is 
deprived  of  nothing  it  has  contracted  for,  but  only  of  judgment  and 
good-will. 


SOCIETY  AND  BEYOND  SOCIETY 


311 


What  corresponds  to  success  in  the  private  order  is 
simply  the  winning  of  love,  i.e.,  being  acceptable  or 
prized  as  a  companion.  And  in  judging  acceptability  the 
private  order  is  indeed  likely  to  ask  few  questions 
about  the  nature  of  the  day’s  work.  Yet  acceptability 
builds  on  that  work  with  the  same  tacit  understanding. 
Here  again  I  do  not  refer  to  the  visible  or  invisible 
“ means  of  support”  which  the  private  order  con¬ 
sumes  :  I  mean,  again,  independence  and  reality  of 
mind.  Although  instinctively  one  expects  that  his  own 
liking  will  find  response,  one  is  always  more  or  less 
aware  that  this  response  is  conditional.  It  is  not  an 
axiom  that  one  must  have  any  friend  at  all.  If  such 
fortune  comes,  it  has  a  kind  of  corroborative  force :  to 
be  loved  is  a  high  order  of  validation.2  And  if  this 
private  world  of  mine  does  not  respond,  I  am  left 
curiously  uncertain  of  myself,  as  if  I  were  somehow 
unreal,  and  for  that  reason  unable  to  love  rightly.  Love 
ought  to  be  a  form  of  the  will  to  power ;  and  my  love 
has  no  power.  I  find  myself  willing  to  suffer  anything, 
forgo  anything  for  the  sake  of  that  acceptance:  I  am 
willing  to  forgo  anything  except  just  that  companion¬ 
ship.  Yet  this  state  of  mind  is  the  symptom  of  false 
instinct.  I  should  know,  and  if  I  were  a  real  person 
would  know,  that  the  companionship  I  value  must 
come  as  a  result  of  first  being  independently  real. 

2  Current  speech  has  phrases  which  suggest  more  or  less  vaguely  that 
some  objective  affirmation  is  contained  in  the  sentiment  of  personal 
liking.  Perhaps  the  vaguer  ones  are  more  nearly  accurate,  as  “There 
is  something  to  him. ”  The  prestige  of  soldierdom  in  the  eyes  of  maiden¬ 
hood  is  of  course  the  most  conspicuous  instance  of  the  psychological 
principle. 


312 


ART  AND  RELIGION 


Hence  I  cannot  have  it  except  at  the  price  of  being 
independent  of  it.  I  must  be  in  truth,  and  not  in  atti¬ 
tude  simply,  “free  as  an  Arab”  of  my  beloved.  And 
this  independence  can  only  come  through  having  an 
object  sufficiently  absorbing  and  responsive,  a  valid 
power  in  the  public  order. 

We  are  speaking  of  the  logic  of  our  commonest  social 
attitudes,  a  logic  which  we  breathe,  not  analyze.  Its 
sum  is  this :  that  each  order  accepts  and  uses  persons 
who  are  assumed,  and  must  be  assumed,  complete  and 
real  in  their  lives  in  the  other  order.  The  alternation 
into  which  life  falls  means  not  alone  that  we  are  finding 
a  freedom  in  each  order  not  found  in  the  other;  it 
means  also  that  we  are  becoming  in  each  order  what 
is  necessary  that  we  may  have  any  right  in  the  other. 
This  is  a  highly  effective  alternation;  and,  so  far  as 
we  can  sustain  ourselves  in  this  world  with  becoming, 
rather  than  being,  it  is  a  self-sufficient  routine,  pro¬ 
viding  within  itself  for  all  its  own  necessities, — and 
also  for  its  own  growth.  To  this  extent,  society  is  an 
organism. 

But  the  same  analysis  will  show  where  the  organism 
fails.  The  fact  of  perpetual  alternation  is  itself  omi¬ 
nous  :  it  confesses  not  alone  the  constant  undermining 
of  satisfaction  that  Schopenhauer  pointed  out;  it  con¬ 
fesses  the  persistent  crumbling  of  our  qualification ; — 
that  qualification  we  must  renew  by  returning  to  its 
source.  And  at  its  best  this  qualification  is,  as  we  said, 
mainly  a  hope  and  a  becoming.  Your  guest  appears  in 
your  circle  as  one  who  presumably  has  done  his  day’s 


SOCIETY  AND  BEYOND  SOCIETY 


313 


work,  and  has  done  it  well.  Yon  introduce  him  as  Mr. 
Blank,  engineer,  or  as  Herr  Geheimrat  Dr.  So-and-so ; 
he  at  once  receives  credit  for  all  that  engineers  or  Ge- 
heimrats  are  supposed  to  he.  These  categories  have 
their  function:  they  impose  upon  individuals  typical 
characters  which  may  fit  so  loosely  as  to  amount  to 
caricatures,  but  they  also  impose  upon  them  ideals 
which  they  find  themselves  bound  to  serve.  No  sooner 
is  it  understood  that  M.  is  a  ‘  scientist  ’  than  the  imagi¬ 
nation  of  his  new  acquaintance  finishes  the  picture, 
surrounds  him  with  records  and  apparatuses,  adjusts 
the  symbolic  microscope  to  his  eye,  and  spreads  upon 
the  pages  of  learned  journals  the  announcements  of  his 
discoveries.  And  he,  however  exasperated  or  amused 
by  the  inept  trappings  of  this  vision,  finds  himself 
obliged  to  respond  to  the  essence  of  the  faith  it  repre¬ 
sents  :  he  sees  that  it  is  in  substance  an  appeal  to  his 
good  faith  as  a  member  of  that  social  world.  Whatever 
is  vague,  idly  classificatory,  and  vain  in  that  picture 
may  be  corrected  or  ignored ;  it  still  searches  out  what 
is  merely  empty  or  merely  promissory  in  himself.  He 
has  no  right  in  that  place  unless  somewhere  he  has  some 
stable  character,  founded  on  achievement  not  merely 
accepted  as  such,  hut  real.  He  must  bring  to  that  social 
life  a  validation  of  spirit  which  not  even  the  public 
order  can  furnish  him,  dealing  as  this  order  does  partly 
in  coin  and  partly  in  approximations  and  hopes.  He  has 
need  of  an  absolute. 

I  conclude  that  in  two  ways  the  social  world,  at  its 
best,  fails  to  satisfy,  and  hence  to  release  or  save  the 
human  being.  It  fails  to  provide  within  its  own  re- 


314 


ART  AND  RELIGION 


sources  the  reality  and  independence  which  it  demands, 
and  in  fact  uses;  it  is  living  upon  borrowed  capital. 
And  given  this  capital,  it  still  fails  to  satisfy ;  because 
while  the  public  order  lends  to  the  private  order  a  scope 
and  expression  that  the  private  order  lacks,  it  does  not 
provide  scope  and  expression  for  just  that  part  of  the 
human  being  wherein  the  private  order  supplements 
the  public  order.  What  the  public  order  fails  to  see  is 
perceived  and  appreciated  in  the  family, — that  is  true : 
but  the  family  is  unable  to  give  this  part  its  needed 
currency,  or  set  it  to  work  in  the  world.  This  residue, 
perhaps  an  infinite  residue,  is  hence  imperfectly  set 
free. 

And  we  may  also  see  the  conditions  under  which 
these  defects  could  be  made  good.  As  the  instinctive 
life  of  man  everywhere  demands  an  environment  within 
which  it  can  be  active,  and  as  the  rule  prevails  that  the 
most  inward  and  hidden  capacities  demand  and  re¬ 
spond  to  the  widest  environment,3  there  must  be  an 
objective  arena  of  unlimited  scope  for  the  lost  powers. 
And  this  arena  must  be  one  in  which  a  veritable  and 
unqualified  success  of  some  sort  is  possible — a  sufficient 
guarantee  of  reality ;  and  such  a  success  as  might  enlist 
a  more  comprehensive  passion  than  either  the  public 
or  the  private  order  calls  forth — hence  a  genuine  in¬ 
dependence.  There  must  be,  in  brief,  an  adequate  and 
attainable  object  for  the  human  will  to  power. 

And  in  two  ways  also,  experience  has  attempted  to 
supply  such  an  arena  and  such  an  object.  First,  there 

3  Cf.  The  Philosophical  Review,  May,  1916,  p.  490. 


SOCIETY  AND  BEYOND  SOCIETY 


315 


are  parts  of  the  world  more  plastic  than  others,  more 
amenable  to  wish  and  fancy ;  in  these,  men  have  learned 
to  create  a  career  both  of  sense  and  of  idea,  in  which 
their  desires  at  once  chained  to  the  real  and  expanding 
into  the  infinite  find  rest  in  the  midst  of  their  own 
motion.  Play  first  opens  this  vista,  giving,  as  we  have 
said,  the  habit  of  success :  and  then  play  is  transmuted 
into  art  as  the  growth  of  idea  outruns  the  literal 
possibilities  of  the  material.  Art  is  the  region  which 
man  has  created  for  himself,  wherein  he  can  find  scope 
for  unexpressed  powers,  and  yet  win  an  absolute  suc¬ 
cess,  in  testimony  of  his  own  reality.  One  who  merely 
conquers  a  world  may  still  wish  for  more  worlds  to 
conquer ;  but  if,  as  artist,  one  has  created  a  world,  the 
will  to  power  has  reached  an  ultimate  goal. 

Second,  religion ,  whose  mission  is  continuous  with 
that  of  art  and  which  some  conceive  as  a  developed 
poetry.  But  religion  intends  to  transcend  the  imagi¬ 
nation,  and  to  reveal  a  world  which  has  an  independent 
reality;  herein  it  exceeds  the  scope  of  art.  More  com¬ 
pletely  than  any  part  of  the  private  order,  religion 
promises  to  recognize  all  the  resources  of  subconscious 
capacity:  “All  men  ignored  in  me,  That  I  was  worth 
to  God.”  It  intends  to  save  the  entire  man,  without 
remainder;  and  if  it  can  offer  to  this  entire  self  the 
kind  of  scope,  actuality,  and  permanence  afforded  by 
the  State,  it  may  fulfil  its  promise. 

Art  and  religion  have  their  own  institutions,  and  are 
commonly  included,  as  we  said,  among  the  resources 
of  ‘  society. ’  But  both  appeal  primarily  and  directly 
to  the  exploring  and  originative  self  which  social  in- 


316 


ART  AND  RELIGION 


heritance,  authority,  and  imitation  can  help  only  after 
it  has  engaged  for  itself  with  its  own  realities.  Art  and 
religion  are  always  in  this  sense  t beyond  society’;  and 
dealing  with  them,  the  individual  also  (not  in  his  pri¬ 
vate  capacity)  is  beyond  society  and  beyond  the  State. 


CHAPTER  XXXVI 


THE  WORLD  OP  REBIRTH 

IT  would  be  a  mistake  to  think  of  religion  and  art 
as  arriving  late  upon  the  scene  of  history,  as  high 
and  last  products  of  evolution,  to  take  care  of  those 
fragments  of  human  nature  left  unsatisfied  by  the 
social  order.  We  would  better  not  try  to  date  their 
arrival  unless  we  are  prepared  to  date  the  rise  of 
reason;  but  in  any  event,  they  arrive  early:  as  soon 
as  man  is  ready  to  contemplate  his  experience  ‘as  a 
whole  ’  they  are  there.  They  undertake  to  provide  for 
the  whole  creature,  not  for  remainders:  and  as  the 
various  social  interests  and  institutions  set  up  inde¬ 
pendent  menages,  religion  and  art  take  care  of  residues 
simply  because  they  continue  to  be  responsible  for  the 
whole.  And  while  in  their  earliest  identifiable  forms 
they  may  seem  simply  to  be  playing  about  the  horizon  of 
consciousness  like  so  much  heat  lightning,  it  is  because 
the  forces  at  work  everywhere  within  the  horizon  be¬ 
come  visible  there.  The  rim  contains  all  that  is  inside ; 
and  if  the  human  world-picture  or  the  scheme  of  human 
purposes  has  a  conceptual  rim,  it  is  their  work. 

I  say  their  work,  because  at  first  religion  and  art  co¬ 
operate  in  providing  that  “objective  arena”  we  were 
calling  for, — an  arena  adequate  for  the  whole  human 
spirit,  and  so  by  implication  for  any  possible  lost 
powers.  Myth,  for  example,  is  such  a  joint  product, 


318 


AET  AND  RELIGION 


neither  pure  art  nor  pure  religion,  representing  a  do¬ 
main  largely  imaginary  and  yet  partly  coincident  with 
reality  super-sensible  and  super-social ;  and  in  the  world 
of  myth  the  human  mind  may  be  regarded  as  occupied 
in  staking  out  cosmic  claims  wherein  desire  and  hope 
can  expand  without  limit.  But  myth  affords  a  rather 
meager  diet  for  the  will;  and  although  it  contains  in 
symbol  the  promise  of  the  literal  achievement  of  the 
future,  it  would  hardly  have  flourished  as  it  did  had 
there  not  been  a  more  concrete  satisfaction  behind  it. 
This  more  concrete  satisfaction  was  found  in  the  direct 
regulation  of  social  life  from  above  by  conceptions 
whose  origin  was  at  once  religious  and  aesthetic,  con¬ 
ceptions  in  which  every  man  could  share  as  he  could 
share  in  the  ideas  of  the  sacred  epic,  but  in  this  case  he 
could  share  actively,  and  not  only  as  one  regulated,  but 
also  as  regulator. 

I  am  thinking  of  the  stage  in  which  all  custom  was 
sacred  custom  and  all  law  sacred  law.  And  I  am  think¬ 
ing  of  the  fact  that  these  bodies  of  regulation  were 
not  simply,  as  we  commonly  picture  them,  a  mould  cast 
over  men’s  lives,  but  a  career  for  their  wills .  As  a 
matter  of  course,  the  law  is  something  which  men  in 
general  obey,  for  the  law  has  power  behind  it ;  but  then, 
law  is  also  something  which  men  transmit  and  inter¬ 
pret,  even  if  they  do  not  make  it,  and  so  far  every  man 
shares  in  the  wielding  of  that  power,  whatever  it  may 
be.  Now  when  the  power  behind  the  law  is  a  religious 
power ;  when  as  the  divine  4  word 9  the  law  has  mana  in 
it ;  when  learning  it  has  the  value  of  communion  with 
the  divine  thinker,  and  sometimes  confers  the  power 


THE  WORLD  OF  REBIRTH 


319 


to  work  miracles  by  tbe  sacred  syllables  alone,  then  to 
stand  at  the  source  of  the  law,  whether  as  authors  or 
transmitters,  is  to  touch  an  instrument  of  unmeasured 
potency.  There  was  a  time  when  every  man  was  ex¬ 
pected  to  assume  this  position,  though  there  were  also 
specialists  in  the  law ;  and  to  this  end,  every  man  must 
receive  a  legal  education, — he  must  be  i initiated’  into 
the  sacred  traditions  of  his  tribe.  As  compared  with 
our  own,  this  educational  process  was  brief,  solemn, 
and  intense ;  and  further,  it  left  an  abiding  mark.  The 
boy  emerged  from  it  a  man.  It  was  his  second  birth.1  He 
was  coming  into  his  social  powers ;  but  he  was  coming 
into  them  through  first  reaching  a  more  ultimate  power. 

Looking  upon  the  law  as  we  now  do,  it  might  not  be 
wholly  easy  to  see  in  it  a  sphere  for  a  passionate  ambi¬ 
tion  transcending  that  of  the  social  order.  Still  less,  if 
we  adopt  the  prevalent  view  of  early  law  as  a  thing 
dealing  chiefly  with  terrors,  consisting  for  the  most 
part  of  tabus,  prohibitions  accompanied  by  threats,  and 
consistent  with  the  theory  that  religion  arises  in  the 
instinct  of  fear.  But  it  is  not  alone  in  the  Hebrew  songs 
that  we  find  declarations  of  love  for  and  delight  in  the 
law  inexplicable  by  any  such  views,  yet  seeming  to  have 

i  The  conception  of  rebirth  first  appears  in  history  in  celebration 
of  this  event.  In  the  law  books  of  India  we  have  the  developed  account 
of  a  conception  already  ancient.  “Their  first  birth/  ’  says  the 
Vasishtha  Dharmasastra,  speaking  of  the  three  upper  castes,  “is  from 
their  mother;  their  second  from  their  investiture  with  the  sacred  girdle. 
In  that  second  birth,  the  Savitri  (verse  of  the  Rig  Veda)  is  the  mother, 
but  the  teacher  is  said  to  be  the  father.  Through  that  which  resides 
above  the  navel  his  offspring  is  produced  when  he  initiates  Brahmanas, 
when  he  teaches  them,  when  he  causes  them  to  offer  oblations,  when  he 
makes  them  holy.  ”  ( Sacred  Books  of  the  Bast,  xiv,  p.  9.) 


320 


ART  AND  RELIGION 


something  more  than  a  rhetorical  basis.  We  have  to 
remember  that  this  initiation  concentrated  into  itself 
all  the  new  vistas  and  liberties  that  come  with  the  ad¬ 
vent  of  maturity.  The  physical  transition  of  puberty  is, 
in  warmer  countries,  commonly  much  rapider  than  with 
us;  the  mental  liberation  is  felt  with  corresponding 
keenness.  But  the  experience  is  not  merely  subjective. 
Law  presupposes  a  very  substantial  form  of  human 
self -contemplation.  The  learner’s  eyes  are  opened:  he 
looks  out  into  a  world  of  objects  which  have  always 
been  around  him,  but  uncomprehended, — the  shapes 
of  tribal  life  in  its  cycle  of  generations,  and  the  prin¬ 
ciples  of  its  structure,  not  tangible  and  transitory  but 
intelligible  and  permanent.  He  sees  himself  a  respon¬ 
sible  agent  in  a  tribal  destiny  which  may  have  had  a 
beginning  in  the  dawn  of  time  but  which  has  no  termin¬ 
able  future.  And  he  is  an  irresistible  agent  so  far  as  he 
himself  can  give  birth  to  thoughts  such  as  all  members 
of  this  undying  community  are  bound  to  worship  and 
obey.  He  finds  himself  emerging  into  the  only  domain  in 
which  unlimited  power  is  possible  to  a  finite  being,  the 
world  governed  by  ideas.  Through  the  weakest  and 
dimmest  part  of  his  nature  he  is  becoming  strong,  be¬ 
cause  he  is  becoming  partner  with  his  gods,  and  per¬ 
ceives,  though  faint  and  far-off,  the  principle  of  their 
omnipotence.  It  is  thus  not  wholly  without  reason  that 
he  claims  to  have  found  in  the  law  a  moment  of  absolute 
satisfaction.  His  second  birth  as  contrasted  with  his 
first  may  with  some  justification  be  described  as  “real, 
exempt  from  age  and  death.”  (Manu,  S.  B.  E.,  xxv, 
p.  57.) 


THE  WOULD  OF  KEBIETH 


321 


This  transition  is  in  substance  the  same  as  that  which 
we  now  often  speak  of  as  conversion .  In  all  ages, 
adolescence,  recapitulating  race  history,  finds  religion 
betimes  on  the  scene,  offering  its  own  career  to  the 
will  in  terms  of  a  law  of  life  that  runs  deeper  than  the 
law  of  the  land.  Conversion,  let  us  note,  is  possible 
only  when  one  can  get  a  reflective  view  of  human 
existence  in  its  natural  round,  its  cost  in  labor,  thought, 
and  pain,  and  its  margin  of  aspiration.  It  comes  to 
adolescence  because  adolescence  has  for  the  first  time 
the  data  for  this  reflection  and  the  capacity  of  full 
self-consciousness.2  To  be  mature  is  to  see  the  pleasure 
of  life  in  the  setting  of  its  labors ;  to  be  adolescent  is  to 
have  sufficient  vigor  to  welcome  it  all.  To  be  converted 
is  to  achieve  this  welcome,  to  catch  the  spirit  of  the 
world  in  full  view  of  both  its  hardships  and  its  allure¬ 
ments.  It  is  to  perceive  the  law  of  the  whole  process  in 
such  a  light  that  to  live  by  it  and  to  promote  it  takes 
immediate  precedence  of  every  other  satisfaction,  and 
especially  of  love  and  ambition,  the  passions  of  the 
social  order. 

We  may  still  learn  something  of  the  nature  of  our 
i  moral  substance ’  from  early  forms  in  which  this  law 
was  cast. 

2  This  is  just  about  all  the  truth  there  is  in  that  dictum  of  Paulsen’s 
that  conversion  presupposes  the  world-weariness  of  a  blase  civilization, — 
with  the  conclusion  that  the  Germanic  peoples  have  never  been  truly- 
converted.  Ethics,  Book  I,  ch.  iv.  He  was  speaking,  however,  of  con¬ 
version  to  Christianity,  a  somewhat  different  matter,  of  which  more 
later  on.  What  conversion  presupposes  is  the  power  of  self-conscious 
reflection  on  human  destiny. 


CHAPTER  XXXVII 


THE  SACRED  LAW 

A  RANDOM  page  or  two  is  sufficient  to  convince 
any  reader  that  the  flavor  of  the  sacred  law  books 
of  the  world  is  unique,  whether  or  not  it  is  to  his  relish. 
As  compared  with  any  modern  statute  book,  one  is  im¬ 
pressed  by  the  mixture  of  the  solemn  and  the  trivial, 
and  by  the  absence  of  reference  either  to  individual 
rights  or  to  social  welfare  as  deliberate  ends.  The 
modem  law  is  largely  an  embodiment  of  the  social  mo¬ 
tives  :  the  ancient  law  is  largely  an  embodiment  of  that 
wherein  religion  and  art  differ  from  society  in  their 
appeal  to  the  will.  It  is  just  this  which  makes  it  particu¬ 
larly  valuable  for  our  present  enquiry. 

As  typical  of  what  to  our  consciousness  are  the  least 
profitable  elements  in  the  sacred  law,  let  us  take  this 
list  of  the  duties  of  a  Snataka,  a  twice-born  man  who 
has  finished  his  studentship : 

Let  him  not  beg  from  anybody,  except  from  a  king  and  a 
pupil ; 

Let  him  not  dwell  together  with  a  person  whose  clothes  are 
foul; 

Let  him  not  step  over  a  stretched  rope  to  which  a  calf  is 
tied; 

Let  him  not  spit  into  water ; 

Let  him  eat  his  food  facing  the  east ;  silently  let  him  swallow 


THE  SACRED  LAW  323 

the  entire  mouthful,  taking  it  up  with  four  fingers  and  a 
thumb ;  and  let  him  not  make  a  noise  while  eating ; 

Let  him  not  dine  together  with  his  wife,  else  his  children 
will  be  destitute  of  manly  vigor ; 

Let  him  not  ascend  a  tree ;  let  him  not  descend  into  a  well ; 
let  him  not  blow  the  fire  with  his  mouth ; 

Let  him  not  ascend  an  unsafe  boat,  or  any  unsafe  convey¬ 
ance  ; 

Let  him  disdain  assemblies  and  crowds; 

Let  him  not  pass  between  the  fire  and  a  Brahmana,  nor 
between  two  fires,  nor  two  Brahmanas; 

Let  him  not  cross  a  river  swimming ; 

Let  him  not  set  out  on  a  journey  when  the  sun  stands  over 
the  trees; 

When  he  has  risen  in  the  last  watch  of  the  night  and  has 
recited  the  Yeda,  he  shall  not  lie  down  again. 

It  might  be  straining  a  point  to  call  this  a  mixture 
of  the  solemn  and  the  trivial.  Apart  from  sporadic 
traces  of  ancient  tabus,  it  belongs  to  the  later,  meticu¬ 
lous  stages  of  law-making,  and  the  gravamen  of  pro¬ 
found  human  issues  is  lacking.  The  primitive  decalogue, 
or  the  Twelve  Tables  of  Rome,  would  give  us  a  different 
proportion;  but  in  no  case  would  we  find  a  basis  of 
social  utility. 

Most  certainly,  religion  was  regarded  as  highly  use¬ 
ful:  it  offered  itself  as  a  means  to  the  1 4  great  practical 
ends”  of  life, — subsistence,  tribal  increase,  success  in 
war  and  other  enterprises:  any  god  worth  the  name 
would  be  of  help  in  such  matters.  Religion  had  no  scorn 
for  utility.  Yet  I  repeat  my  belief  that  the  sacred  law 
books  of  the  world  are  closed  with  seven  seals  to  those 
who  try  to  see  in  them  social  instruments,  however 


324 


ART  AND  RELIGION 


crude,  for  reaching  social  goods.  Religion  had  ends  of 
its  own:  its  utility  was  a  consequence.  All  the  social, 
even  the  physical  ends  of  life,  once  caught  in  the  per¬ 
spective  of  the  sacred  concerns,  remain  incidents  in  the 
profounder  economy.  When  eating  and  food-getting 
have  once  become  implicated  in  the  circuits  of  mana, 
they  never  quite  return  to  the  status  of  simple  physical 
satisfaction.1  Religion  undertakes  not  to  disregard 
utility,  nor  yet  to  follow  it,  but  rather  to  give  laws  to 
utility,  by  conferring  upon  all  subordinate  ends  the 
quality  of  its  own  interpretation  of  the  will  to  power. 

What  this  interpretation  is,  early  religion  itself  had 
no  perfect  way  of  expressing.  When  it  tries  to  give 
reasons  for  obedience,  it  commonly  presents  its  case 
in  highly  utilitarian  fashion:  as  a  system  of  rewards 
and  punishments  often  frankly  material  in  quality, 
religious  law  not  infrequently  proclaims  the  advan¬ 
tages  of  holiness  as  the  best-found  way  to  social  goods 
(and  especially  to  esteem)  or  to  the  joys  of  heaven, 

i  The  same  may  be  said  of  evils  and  wrongs  as  of  goods.  A  crime 
does  not  lose  its  basis  in  physical  injury,  nor  does  the  punishment  of 
crime  cast  loose  from  the  feeling  of  resentment;  but  the  whole  situation 
acquires  a  wider  meaning  when  the  interest  of  the  deities  is  involved. 
Speaking  of  the  sacred  law  of  early  Rome,  Professor  Henry  Goudy  says : 
“It  punished  murder,  for  it  was  the  taking  of  a  god-given  life;  the 
sale  of  a  wife  by  her  husband,  for  she  had  become  his  partner  in  all 
things  human  and  divine;  the  lifting  of  a  hand  against  a  parent,  for 
it  was  subversive  of  the  first  bond  of  society  and  religion, — the  rever¬ 
ence  due  by  a  child  to  those  to  whom  he  owed  his  existence;  incestuous 
connexions,  for  they  defiled  the  altar;  the  false  oath  and  the  broken 
vow,  for  they  were  an  insult  to  the  divinities  invoked;  the  displacement 
of  a  boundary  or  a  landmark,  not  so  much  because  the  act  was  provoca¬ 
tive  of  feud  as  because  the  march-stone  itself,  as  the  guarantee  of  peace¬ 
ful  neighborhood,  was  under  the  guardianship  of  the  gods.  ” 


THE  SACRED  LAW 


325 


or  to  both.  From  the  standpoint  of  a  wise  social  philoso¬ 
phy  it  seems  obvious  enough  that  the  sacred  law  is  but 
making  a  shrewd  appeal  to  the  ingrained  love  of  ap¬ 
proval  to  drive  with  the  developing  individuality  of  the 
self-conscious  animal  a  good  social  bargain;  it  is  ar¬ 
ranging  that  his  egoism  and  vanity  shall  turn  the  social 
mill. 

I  shall  not  debate  the  matter  at  length.  But  I  may 
point  out  that  in  the  midst  of  the  welter  of  banal  mo¬ 
tives,  it  is  clear  that  transposing  the  prospect  of  reward 
to  the  transcendent  alters  its  psychological  quality.  One 
who  daily  recites  the  Savitri  verse  during  three  years, 
untired,  is  assured  by  Manu  that  “he  will  enter  after 
death  the  highest  Brahman,  move  as  free  as  air,  and 
assume  an  ethereal  form”;  the  pitiable  bathos  and  in¬ 
adequacy  of  this  dazzle  of  supernatural  potency  stamp 
it  as  an  attempt  less  to  describe  a  literal  result  than  to 
encourage  an  adherent  germ  of  something  different 
from  the  visible  and  material  satisfaction.  And  while 
the  esteem  of  the  multitude  seems  to  have  been  in  the 
eyes  of  the  Eastern  saint  a  most  impressive  reward,  so 
much  so  that  his  type  names,  the  “princely  man”  of 
Confucius,  the  Aharat,  etc.,  were  names  of  social  distinc¬ 
tion  as  well  as  of  religious  attainment,  the  law  occa¬ 
sionally  hits  upon  a  clear  statement  to  the  effect  that 
it  aims  less  to  provide  respect  than  to  make  men  worthy 
of  respect.  “He  who  knows  and  follows  the  law  is  a 
righteous  man:  he  becomes  most  worthy  of  praise  in 
this  world  and  after  death  gains  heaven.  ’ 9  Such  is  the 
opening  and  wholly  typical  appeal  of  the  Yasishtha 
Dharmasastra, 


326 


ART  AND  RELIGION 


II 

If  any  evidence  of  the  non-utilitarian  basis  of  the 
sacred  law  were  needed  beyond  the  character  of  the 
laws  themselves,  it  might  be  found,  together  with  some 
positive  light  upon  the  religious  end,  in  certain  inklings 
of  its  psychological  origin.  The  law  is  sometimes  said 
to  have  its  source  (or  organ  of  reception)  in  the  ‘soul’ 
as  distinct  from  the  prudential  reason.  Now  the  human 
being,  if  we  bring  together  the  testimony  of  ancient 
religions,  is  provided  with  a  great  variety  of  souls.  But 
in  general,  the  soul  is  that  part  of  a  man  which  holds 
conversation  with  the  super-sensible  world :  and  only  a 
being  with  a  soul  can  either  receive  the  law,  whose  ori¬ 
gin  is  in  heaven,  or  appreciate  and  be  governed  by  it. 
One  of  the  best  literary  instances  of  the  soul  engaged 
in  devising  and  promulgating  the  law  is  found  in  the 
sayings  of  Ptah  Hotep.  For  Egypt  had  an  especially 
usable  development  of  the  soul-idea  (and  it  would  be 
hard  to  say  how  much  of  moral  progress  depends  on 
the  discovery  of  usable  conceptions).  Among  the  Egyp¬ 
tian  souls  there  was  one,  the  ha ,2  which  was  particularly 
concerned  with  moral  and  aesthetic  discrimination.  To 
“offend  the  ha”  was  about  the  same  as,  with  us,  “to 
offend  the  finer  feelings”;  and  reverence  for  the  ha 

2  The  lea  is  defined  as  the  immaterial  self  or  double,  having  the  form 
of  the  body,  but  being  without  the  power  of  acting  upon  matter.  Its 
action  therefore  must  be  wholly  persuasive  or  advisory,  and  perhaps 
for  this  reason  it  was  at  the  same  time  the  object  of  a  somewhat  chival¬ 
rous  regard,  and  a  source  of  the  degree  of  chivalry  attained  (if  I  may 
be  allowed  the  anachronism)  by  the  ancient  Egyptians.  The  personal 
affections  centered  about  the  lea,  and  it  received  the  chief  tendance  after 
death. 


THE  SACRED  LAW 


327 


implied  a  careful  listening  to  the  dictates  of  a  reli¬ 
giously  sensitized  conscience.  The  ka  takes  under  its 
protection  the  otherwise  defenceless  rights  of  persons 
and  occasions,  even  to  the  requirements  of  courtesy. 
For  example,  Ptah  Hotep,  not  himself  a  priest  but  a 
wholly  competent  interpreter  of  the  moral  tradition  of 
Egypt,  gives  instructions  to  his  son  thus : 

Do  not  pierce  the  host  at  table  with  many  glances :  it  is  an 
abomination  to  the  ka  for  them  to  be  directed  at  him.  .  .  . 

Diminish  not  the  time  of  following  the  heart  (i.e.,  of  recrea¬ 
tion),  for  that  is  an  abomination  to  the  ka,  that  its  moment 
should  be  disregarded.  .  .  . 

The  washing  of  the  heart  shall  not  be  repeated :  it  is  abomi¬ 
nation  to  the  ka.  .  .  .  (The  washing  of  the  heart  being  words 
uttered  to  give  vent  to  feelings  angry  or  otherwise.) 

It  is  the  ka  that  openeth  the  hands  of  the  host.  .  .  . 

It  is  evident  that  the  ka  is  the  guardian  not  alone  of 
the  uncodified  obligations  of  loyalty,  hut  also  of  the 
generous  and  outgoing  impulses,  and  of  the  more  in¬ 
tangible  demands  of  the  relation  of  guest  to  host,  etc. 
It  is  clearly,  too,  a  function  which  can  be  appealed  to 
only  with  some  maturity  of  experience.  Yet  it  acts  dog¬ 
matically  ;  it  judges  the  quality  of  an  act  without  regard 
to  its  experienced  utility;  the  standard  of  judgment 
seems  to  be  at  once  religious  and  aesthetic, — an  un¬ 
distinguished  union  of  the  two  in  which  now  one  and 
now  the  other  is  predominant. 

This  is  not  a  type  of  judgment  with  which  we  are 
unfamiliar.  For  good  or  ill,  this  ancient  religious  legis¬ 
lation  is  the  first  great  extension  over  human  life  of 
the  sway  of  a  priori  reason , — that  is  to  say,  the  asser- 


328 


ART  AND  RELIGION 


tion  of  thought,  in  advance  of  trial  and  error,  that 
something  will  necessarily  be  found  true  or  valuable 
within  experience.  If  anything  is  true  a  priori ,  it  is, 
of  course,  true  for  all  time  and  in  all  circumstances. 
Accordingly,  a  sense  of  unrestricted  validity  enters 
into  this  legislation,  and  accompanies  it  unflinchingly 
into  its  profoundest  absurdities.  Questions  of  scope 
aside,  it  must  be  agreed  that  if  the  human  will  is  to 
find  any  spot  of  complete  mastery,  it  can  only  be  pos¬ 
sible  through  some  such  grasp  of  values  that  endure : 
to  adapt  a  phrase  of  John  Locke’s,  men  can  only  be  born 
free  as  they  are  born  thus  rational  and  prophetic. 
Whether  we  can  grasp  any  such  durable  principles  is 
a  question  of  fact  not  here  in  debate.  But  it  is  clear  that 
so  far  as  a  people  had  in  common  the  same  type  of 
sensitivity,  the  same  ha,  the  same  necessary  interests 
at  the  basis  of  the  aesthetic  judgments  therein  uttered, 
the  pronouncements  of  any  healthy  ha  would  tend  to 
be  good  for  all  others.  And  a  prevalent  respect  for  such 
utterances  would  tend  to  make  people  plastic  toward 
them,  and  so  to  lend  to  one  who  spoke  authentically  in 
the  name  of  the  ha  the  power  of  an  artist  over  his  ma¬ 
terial.  The  life-forms  of  a  social  group  under  these  con¬ 
ditions  would  become  the  medium  for  an  art  in  which 
nothing  desirable  could  he  excluded  as  impossible,  and 
in  which  everything  desirable  could  be  expected  to  last. 

Such  seems,  in  fact,  to  have  been  the  position  assumed 
for  itself  by  the  sacred  law.  And  in  Ptah  Hotep  himself 
I  find  the  most  ancient  expression  of  the  prophetic  con¬ 
sciousness  with  regard  to  his  own  precepts.  “The 
quality  of  truth,”  he  said,  “is  among  their  excellences. 


THE  SACRED  LAW  329 

Nor  shall  any  word  that  hath  here  been  set  down  cease 
ont  of  this  land  forever.  ’ ’ 


III 

In  the  amenity  and  chivalry  of  the  Egyptian  spirit 
it  would  be  hard  to  say  whether  the  aesthetic  or  the 
moral  motive  is  dominant.  But  in  the  laws  of  Persia 
and  of  India  there  are  frequent  passages  in  which  the 
aesthetic  sense,  the  regard  for  decorum,  the  desire  for 
purity  amounting  at  times  to  inconceivable  squeamish¬ 
ness,  is  in  control.  The  list  of  duties  of  a  Snataka  above 
quoted  is  an  example  of  such  almost  purely  aesthetic 
apriorism.  These  alleged  duties  are  largely  dictates 
derived  from  a  notion  of  personal  dignity,  a  form  of 
art  which  decrees  what  external  carriage  shall  be  taken 
as  a  symbol  of  an  internal  ascendency.  To  step  over  a 
stretched  rope  to  which  a  calf  is  tied  will  be  admitted 
hazardous  if  dignity  is  to  be  preserved;  and  perhaps 
an  exceptionally  holy  man  would  need  to  be  reminded  of 
the  contingency.  Such  rules  would  have  the  inciden¬ 
tal  utility  of  keeping  countenance  with  the  bystand¬ 
ers  ;  but  as  is  always  the  case  in  aesthetic  judg¬ 
ments,  the  feelings  of  the  bystanders  have  a  discover¬ 
able  and  defensible  basis.  By  undertaking  something 
beyond  his  physical  powers  the  holy  man  brings  dis¬ 
credit  both  upon  himself  and  upon  his  office ;  for  nothing 
more  quickly  disproves  the  divine  quality  than  an  in¬ 
ability  to  recognize  one ’s  own  sphere  of  validity  and  its 
limits.  Climbing  trees,  swimming  rivers,  ascending  un¬ 
safe  boats  and  the  like,  are  for  the  experimental  stages 
of  youth,  not  for  high-caste  householders  with  a  tradi- 


330 


ART  AND  RELIGION 


tion  to  sustain.  With  us,  dignity  is  a  far  less  vulnerable 
essence  and  so  requires  no  such  scrupulous  protection ; 
but  we  have  had  the  advantage  of  learning  from  the 
Stoics  that  “freedom  from  perturbation”  may  be  a 
purely  internal  accomplishment.  These  beginnings  had 
their  own  justification. 

But  they  were  justified  also  in  another  way.  The 
aesthetic  standard  has  a  hospitable  nature  and  protects 
the  early  stages  of  many  another  budding  ideal.  To 
exclude  the  jarring  and  unfit  is  to  give  every  voice  of 
inner  protest,  from  whatever  source,  a  chance  to  be 
heard. 

And  after  all,  it  is  not  a  matter  of  surprise  that 
the  first  efforts  in  law  should  have  been  innocent  of 
the  argument  from  effect  to  cause  as  we  understand 
it :  legislation  based  on  social  utility  is  not  yet  a  fully 
accepted  practice.  The  surprise  is  rather  that,  referring 
itself  to  independent  principles,  this  ancient  law  should 
so  frequently  have  hit  upon  the  useful.  Without  de¬ 
clining  to  recognize  in  men  only  a  few  centuries  earlier 
than  ourselves  a  kindred  common  sense,  it  seems  fair 
to  judge  with  most  recent  students  of  the  history  of 
law  that  the  rules  regarding  purity  and  purifications,  in 
the  midst  of  much  that  is  overdrawn,  have  unwittingly 
anticipated  important  principles  of  general  sanitation. 
^Esthetic  regard  for  ‘ decency’  has  always  been  an  im¬ 
portant  factor  in  racial  health  and  soundness.  (But  let 
me  say  in  passing  that  it  seems  to  me  an  open  question 
whether  the  aesthetic  standard  in  the  conduct  of  sex- 
behavior  does  not  to  this  day  contain  more  truth  and 
meaning  than  the  hygienic  and  eugenic  utilities  so  com- 


THE  SACKED  LAW 


331 


monly  regarded  as  ultimate  tests; — to  my  mind  these 
tests  fall  into  the  logical  position  of  ‘negative  pragma¬ 
tism/)  The  significant  tabus  which  center  about  the 
feeling  that  blood  is  a  substance  of  mysterious  potency 
have  probably  an  aesthetic  basis ;  but  they  have  had  an 
immense  utility,  as  in  fixing  social  attitudes  toward 
murder  and  suicide,  in  the  treatment  of  blood-kinship, 
in  the  care  of  women,  and  in  the  treatment  of  disease. 
A  great  deal  of  disutility  has  accompanied  this  utility 
and  in  time  outweighed  it.  But  this  fact  does  not 
cancel  the  primary  fact  that  the  aesthetic  judgment 
tends  to  find  the  useful  long  before  the  power  of  causal 
reasoning  is  sufficiently  developed  to  find  it.  It  must 
be  remembered,  too,  that  these  utilities  were  not  super¬ 
ficial,  but  the  radical  utilities  of  human  life.  If  the 
struggle  for  existence  has  eliminated  the  groups  which 
lacked  this  happy  correspondence  of  intuition  with 
vital  expediency,  the  fact  remains  that  in  those  that 
survived  the  intuition  itself  has  operated  as  an  inde¬ 
pendent  organ  of  judgment. 

Even  when  the  causal  connection  is  invoked  in  the 
sacred  law,  it  is  frequently  a  postulate  of  the  fitness 
of  things  rather  than  a  result  of  empirical  observa¬ 
tion.  Certain  types  of  behavior  ought  to  have  certain 
results;  and  such  results  are  forthwith  ascribed  to 
them.  Thus,  upper  castes  may  marry  only  upper  castes ; 
otherwise,  “the  degradation  of  the  family  certainly 
ensues,  and  after  death,  the  loss  of  heaven/’  Buying  a 
wife  is  an  undesirable  way  of  acquiring  one,  because 
“shp  who  has  been  bought  by  her  husband  afterward 
unites  herself  with  strangers.”  And,  as  in  the  rules 


332 


ART  AND  RELIGION 


already  quoted,  if  one  dines  with  one’s  wife,  “his  chil¬ 
dren  will  be  destitute  of  manly  vigor.”  Causality  of 
this  sort  implies  crediting  the  objective  world  with  a 
structure  akin  to  one’s  own  principles  of  preference. 
The  idea  of  karma  is  the  most  complete  expression  of 
this  trait :  for  karma  means  that  the  world  is  at  bottom 
a  moral  order  in  which  whatever  ought  to  result  does 
result.  Here  the  aesthetic  apriorism  gives  way  to  an 
ethical  apriorism . 

IV 

In  the  demands  or  supposed  demands  of  fitness  it 
is  never  easy  to  detect  the  point  at  which  the  aesthetic 
disappears  in  the  ethical.  The  many  rules  which  dis¬ 
tinguish  lawful  from  unlawful  occupations,  or  clean 
from  unclean  foods,  may  have  little  behind  them  apart 
from  the  whims  of  feeling  except  historical  attitudes 
associated  with  the  several  materials  dealt  with.  If 
the  Brahmana  trades  he  must  not  sell  stones,  salt, 
hempen  cloth,  etc.,  through  a  long  list;  nor  must  he 
lend  6  ‘  like  a  usurer.  ’  ’  But  to  this  last-named  rule  there 
is  an  exception  which  introduces  a  new  element.  The 
Brahmana  must  not  lend  “unless  he  to  whom  he  lends 
is  exceedingly  wicked,  neglecting  his  sacred  duties.” 
There  is  some  justification,  it  appears,  for  dealing 
foully  with  the  foul  if  one  deals  with  them  at  all.  The 
principle  of  balance  here  is  no  longer  primarily  aes¬ 
thetic,  the  elements  of  the  picture  are  the  wills  of  free 
men  in  noetic  interplay,  and  appeal  is  made  to  a  senti¬ 
ment  of  a  priori  justice.  Upon  such  a  sentiment  of 
ethical  balance  early  equity  was  built. 


THE  SACKED  LAW 


333 


The  symmetry  of  the  lex  talionis  rides  rough-shod 
over  the  psychological  differences  of  actions  outwardly 
similar.  It  ignores  intentions  and  circumstances.  Its 
simplicity  is  thus  specious;  and  with  all  ‘natural  right’ 
it  must  fall  under  the  suspicion  of  historically  minded 
thinkers  like  Sir  Henry  Maine.  But  the  psychological 
observer  sometimes  forgets  that  the  main  facts  in  the 
psychology  of  any  situation  are  the  facts  which  to  the 
minds  concerned  seem  objective.  We  dare  not  forget 
that  the  force  of  a  law  is  in  the  mind  that  interprets 
it,  not  in  the  actual  circumstances  or  motives  which 
breed  the  occasion.  Ideally  speaking,  the  only  real 
situation  is  the  situation  as  felt  and  understood  by 
those  that  take  part  in  it;  and  simple  minds  will  con¬ 
ceive  their  own  deeds  and  interests  simply.  The  sym¬ 
metry  of  early  law  is  the  very  quality  which,  by  its 
obvious  give  and  take,  is  fittest  to  serve  as  a  language. 
The  punishment  which  has  the  saving  grace  of  fitting 
the  crime  as  the  perpetrator  conceives  it  is  the  only 
punishment  which  has  any  chance  of  seeming  right  to 
him.  He  can  be  reconciled  if  at  all  only  by  a  reaction 
which  he  can  read  at  once  as  meaningful.  The  sacred 
law  may  well  have  had  in  this  respect  a  literal  ‘  saving 
grace  ’  such  as  more  carefully  studied  measures  might 
wholly  miss. 

This  primitive  equity  of  balance  is  not  incapable  of 
progress.  Any  growth  in  understanding  the  nature  of 
the  act  to  be  balanced  will  be  echoed  in  the  treatment ; 
hence  primitive  equity,  so  far  from  being  fixed,  is 
highly  variable.  According  to  the  Jewish  law,  if  a  son 
were  to  strike  his  father,  he  must  be  put  to  death  (Exo- 


334 


AET  AND  KELIGION 


dus  21.  15) ;  the  code  of  Hammurabi  prescribes  that  he 
must  lose  his  hand.  Fitness  may  be  claimed  for  each 
rule;  the  deciding  factor  is  to  be  found  in  the  concep¬ 
tion  of  the  offence,  and  this  conception  is  capable  of 
indefinite  refinement. 

And  I  doubt  whether  any  degree  of  progress  will  do 
more  than  perfect  this  refinement.  The  principle  of 
equity  we  shall  not  outgrow.  Deficient  as  the  sacred  law 
is  in  legal  insight,  it  was  not  astray  in  its  first  princi¬ 
ples.  Indeed,  its  special  and  only  proper  function  was 
the  finding  of  first  principles;  and  it  may  be  well  to 
attempt  a  summary  of  what  is  permanently  valid  in  its 
work. 

The  sources  of  value  are  to  be  preferred  above  all 
specific  values  that  flow  from  them.  This  is  not  a  maxim 
of  prudence,  dictating  a  wise  regard  as  for  the  goose 
that  lays  the  golden  eggs.  It  is  rather  a  principle  of 
value-experience.  It  shows  itself  not  only  in  the  recur¬ 
rent  demands  for  the  honoring  of  the  gods,  the  ances¬ 
tors,  the  father  and  mother,  but  also  in  the  claims  for 
reverence  toward  the  sacred  law  itself,  and  its  trustees. 
It  is  sometimes  thought  that  the  law  of  sacrilege,  con¬ 
taining  much  interested  legislation  and  offering  the 
best  foothold  for  priestly  corruption,  is  pre-eminently 
the  outgrown  element  in  ancient  law.  But  this  will  not 
be  the  case  until  the  sentiment  of  national  honor,  an 
object  of  vague,  frequently  fanatical,  but  essentially 
religious  devotion,  and  the  idea  of  regard  for  parents 
as  a  fundamental  duty  are  outgrown.  Respect  for  law 
is  still  deeper  in  the  human  consciousness  than  interest 
in  any  particular  law.  And  no  advantage  could  compen- 


THE  SACRED  LAW 


335 


sate  any  community  for  the  vanishing  of  the  spirit  of 
reverence  out  of  which  all  justice  and  all  culture  must 
come.  This  principle  of  the  ancient  law  is  still  valid. 

Personality  is  to  be  set  above  property.  This  might 
be  regarded  as  a  corollary  of  the  above  principle,  if 
we  assume  that  the  value  of  property  depends  in  any 
respect  upon  personality.  That  this  is  the  case  is 
broadly  hinted  in  various  passages  of  sacred  law,  thus : 
“Whatever  exists  in  the  world  is  the  property  of  the 
Brahmana;  on  account  of  the  excellence  of  his  origin 
the  Brahmana  is,  indeed,  entitled  to  it  all.”  (Manu, 
I,  100.)  But  apart  from  the  somewhat  over-simple 
theory  of  distributive  justice  here  promulgated,  the 
meaning  of  the  principle  is  seen  especially  in  three 
ways :  the  regard  for  the  dignity  of  the  person  as  worth 
every  necessary  sacrifice  of  utility;  the  indisposition 
to  accept  a  compounding  for  personal  injury  by  fines 
alone,  so  long  as  the  law  remained  sacred  law ;  and  the 
attempt,  in  the  clash  of  personal  interests,  to  ignore 
property  differences  as  irrelevant.  When  a  sufficient 
number  of  differences  among  men  have  been  set  aside 
as  irrelevant  to  the  concerns  of  justice,  the  principle 
here  stated  will  blossom  out  in  the  form  of  a  theory 
of  equality  before  the  law, — in  which  form,  the  ancient 
principle  vigorously  survives.  And  we  have  had  recent 
occasion  to  reaffirm  the  judgment  that  crimes  against 
property  are  not  to  be  weighed  off  with  crimes  against 
persons  and  against  humanity. 

In  such  ways  as  these  the  sacred  law  makes  good 
its  claim  that  there  is  a  rule  of  life  which  gives  laws 
to  utility.  It  is  always  true,  human  nature  being  what 


336 


ART  AND  RELIGION 


it  is,  that  nothing  can  be  useful  which  fails  to  satisfy 
equity,  personality,  honor.  So  long  as  Russian  peas¬ 
ants  believe  as  they  have  believed  about  methods  of 
agriculture,  it  is  not  a  useful  procedure  to  introduce 
mechanical  reapers  and  binders  among  them :  dissipate 
these  beliefs  and  a  new  market  is  open  to  the  world; 
but  in  no  case  is  utility  freed  to  stand  as  something  in¬ 
dependent  of  the  preferences  and  faiths  of  human 
nature,  whether  true  or  false.  And  so  long  as  we  hold 
the  belief  that  a  man  is  worth  more  than  his  property, 
it  will  be  impossible  not  alone  to  compensate  murder 
with  a  money-payment,  but  to  hold  slaves,  or  to  equate 
man-power  with  horse-power,  however  advantageous 
the  procedure  from  the  purely  economic  standpoint. 

Hence  it  is  not  true  as  Maine  asserts  that  the  in¬ 
fluence  of  theocratic  legislation  disappears  with  the 
advent  of  kings.  But  it  is  true  that  with  the  advent  of 
kings  another  type  of  judgment  must  enter  as  co-opera¬ 
tive  with  this  one. 


V 

The  abuses  and  crudities  of  the  sacred  law  are  so 
much  in  evidence  that  they  almost  usurp  the  attention 
of  observers ;  and  it  is  necessary  here  to  advert  to  them 
only  for  the  sake  of  due  proportion.  Those  who  regard 
the  connection  of  religion  with  morals  as  on  the  whole 
unfortunate  for  morals — and  there  are  many  such — 
have  in  mind  the  insistence  on  a  blind  obedience,  the 
diversion  of  thought  from  the  experiential  and  social 
basis  of  righteousness,  and  the  tendency  to  condone  the 


THE  SACRED  LAW  337 

humanly  pernicious  if  the  religiously  correct  is  pre¬ 
served.  These  are  grave  evils. 

The  nature  of  them  might  be  comprehended,  perhaps, 
in  the  statement  that  religion  is  prone  to  exaggerate  its 
primacy  into  a  separation.  It  finds  a  true  absolute,  but 
is  apt  to  set  it  up  as  exclusive  of  the  relative  and  prag¬ 
matic  instead  of  including  and  co-operating  with  them. 
In  artificial  restrictions  upon  human  intercourse,  in 
the  cultivation  of  mistrust  and  aversion  toward  the 
unbeliever,  in  depriving  heretics  of  privileges  and  even 
of  fair  play,  in  inculcating  an  artificial  terror  of  the  be¬ 
yond  so  great  as  to  obscure  every  useful  motive  and  so 
to  retain  intact  the  most  preposterous  customs,  in  hos¬ 
tility  to  novelty,  the  custodians  of  the  sacred  law  have 
done  incalculable  harm  both  to  mankind  and  to  religion 
itself.  In  face  of  all  this,  it  may  be  said  that  if  mankind 
could  have  won  its  hold  upon  a  region  of  absolute  satis¬ 
faction  only  at  this  cost,  it  was  worth  the  sacrifice.3 

But  human  nature  outgrows  the  need  of  any  such 
sacrifice.  Indeed,  these  abuses  are  incidents  of  a  middle 
stage  in  the  development  of  law,  the  struggle  of  the 
secular  principle  to  secure  recognition.  The  original 
tendency  of  the  sacred  law  is  not  to  reject  the  aid  of 
secular  principles  but  to  make  place  for  them.  The  jus 
of  the  Roman  comitia  was  regarded  as  under  divine 
auspices,  and  a  natural  supplement  to  the  sacred  fas. 
Likewise  under  the  wing  of  theocratic  law  there  grew 

3  I  may  remind  the  reader  of  the  remark  of  Walter  Bagehot’s  that  at 
a  critical  point  in  the  development  of  human  societies  it  was  more  im¬ 
portant  that  there  should  be  law,  than  that  there  should  be  good  law. 
It  was  the  religious  temper  that  made  law  possible. 


338 


ART  AND  RELIGION 


up  in  many  regions  a  body  of  worldly  wisdom  based  on 
experience  and  taking  the  form  of  proverb  or  fable,  the 
first  humanizations  of  ethics,  so  little  conscious  of  an¬ 
tagonism  of  principle  that  the  sayings  of  Solomon  could 
find  their  way  into  the  sacred  canon.  The  antagonism 
existed,  however,  and  was  bound  to  appear,  because  the 
a  priori  vision  of  the  human  mind  cannot  safely  proceed 
much  farther  than  first  principles;  the  detail  of  the 
law,  like  the  detail  of  the  body  of  science,  has  to  be  built 
by  the  aid  of  pragmatic  considerations.  The  rubbish  of 
overwrought  aestheticism  had  to  give  way  to  the  press¬ 
ing  utilities.  Religion  had  to  learn  the  lesson  of  content¬ 
ing  itself  with  the  right  of  giving  to  all  second  prin¬ 
ciples  their  final  meaning.  We  shall  have  recovered 
the  original  and  normal  relation  between  the  secular 
and  the  sacred  when  we  can  treat  murder,  adultery, 
perjury,  breach  of  contract,  etc.,  on  the  ground  of  social 
expediency  without  feeling  the  need  to  deny  that  they 
are  also  “abominations  to  the  ka”  and  “to  the  Lord.” 

Meantime  religion  and  art,  relieved  of  social  burdens 
to  which  they  were  only  partly  fitted,  were  free  to  assert 
to  the  full  their  specific  natures.  To  these  we  now  turn. 


CHAPTER  XXXVIII 


ART  AND  HUMAN  NATURE 

UNSATISFIED  wishes  press  in  all  directions,  and 
seize  on  every  promising  object.  They  find  the 
stuff  of  dreams  and  day-dreams  most  accessible  and 
yielding :  the  imagination  is  the  infinite  space  in  which 
endless  flimsy  exploits  occur  at  will,  pictures  and 
promises  of  the  unrealized  satisfaction. 

But  apart  from  their  lack  of  substantiality,  these 
easy  private  conquests  have  the  disadvantage  which 
always  attends  non-resistance.  They  fail  to  mark  the 
distinction  between  a  passing  fancy  and  a  profound 
need.  They  fail  to  leave  the  marks  of  a  genuine  experi¬ 
ence;  they  arouse  inadequate  after-images,  and  so  give 
little  aid  in  learning  what  our  real  as  opposed  to  our 
apparent  wishes  are.  Hence  in  the  world  of  dreams, 
taken  by  itself,  primitive  expressions  of  instinct 
flourish,  interpreting  power  flags,  and  the  unsatisfied 
will  necessarily  remains  unsatisfied.  For  where  every 
desire  is  appeased  as  it  arises,  or  where  every  impulse 
assumes  full  sway,  at  least  one  large  human  need  must 
be  permanently  repressed,  the  need  for  self-knowledge. 
In  dreams,  individual  personality  is  at  a  minimum.  The 
will  to  power  requires  a  stiffer  medium  for  even  so 
much  as  a  picture  of  its  residual  need. 

Such  a  medium  it  can  only  find  in  that  same  physical 
world  which,  by  hypothesis,  is  refusing  literal  satis- 


340 


ART  AND  RELIGION 


faction.  If  the  will  cannot  enjoy,  it  can  still  depict 
enjoyment  :  and  the  effort  to  depict  gives  substance 
and  consistency  to  the  dream.  And  as  in  remembering 
an  experience,  one  contemplates  one’s  self  engaged  in 
the  experience,  so  in  depicting  enjoyment  one  depicts 
one’s  self  enjoying.  The  war  dance  which  dramatizes 
the  victory  not  yet  won  is  not  a  mere  representation 
of  fighting  and  winning :  it  is  a  self-portrait  of  man  as 
victor.  It  is  a  real  experience,  and  may  he  the  basis  for 
progress  in  interpreting  the  will.  Such  physically  em¬ 
bodied  dreams  are  ‘ works  of  art.’  The  work  of  art  is 
the  dream  made  objective,  permanent,  self-conscious, 
mutual.1 


I 

The  work  of  art  is  mutual  or  social  partly  because 
as  a  physical  object  it  cannot  help  being  public,  open 
to  common  judgment.  But  it  is  social  also  because  it 
intends  to  exert  a  power  of  its  own.  It  may  or  may 
not  be  the  conscious  intention  of  the  artist  to  announce 
any  new  gospel  regarding  the  human  will,  though  he  is 
quite  as  likely  to  be  the  rebel  or  the  prophet  as  to  be 
the  spokesman  of  any  established  social  order.  His 
art  is  ‘beyond  society’  inasmuch  as  its  source  is  in  his 

i  The  Freudian  view  of  art  is  composed  of  an  axiom  and  an  untruth. 
The  axiom  is  that  repressed  wishes  express  themselves  in  art  forms.  For 
if  man  makes  anything  at  all,  how  should  he  make  except  in  such  wise 
as  to  satisfy  himself?  The  work  of  his  hand  will  necessarily  reveal  any 
craving,  analyzed  or  not,  which  is  given  liberty  to  assert  itself  in  that 
work.  The  untruth  is  in  the  answer  to  the  question,  What  wish  is 
expressed  in  art  forms?  The  Freudian  answer  is  perverse  in  its  empha¬ 
sis.  The  true  answer  is,  Not  any  one  wish,  but  the  total  wish  of  man, — 
the  will. 


ART  AND  HUMAN  NATURE 


341 


private  dream  of  precisely  that  good  which  society 
so  far  fails  to  supply.2  But  he  intends  none  the  less 
through  his  art  to  speak  across  to  the  similarly  unsat¬ 
isfied  wishes  of  his  kind.  In  displaying  his  work,  it 
is  as  if  he  said,  ‘  ‘  This  is  my  wish, — Is  it  yours  also  l — 
Has  it  man  in  it?” 

The  satisfaction  offered  by  art  is  symbolic,  not 
actual;  hence  the  power  of  art  to  satisfy  is  limited 
by  the  scope  of  symbol.  Yet  the  region  which  art  opens 
to  the  will  is  not  one  of  pure  fancy  or  illusion.  As  the 
unrealized  wish  is  a  wish  for  something  veritable,  the 
art  which  appeases  it  is  bound  to  convince,  not  to  mock. 
It  conveys  to  the  mind  some  account  of  reality;  it  is 
never  the  mere  projection  of  the  subjective  longing. 
The  tie  between  art  and  reality  is  seen  in  the  path 
which  leads  from  imitation  to  certain  forms  of  art. 
Imitation  is  not  art,  but  the  imitation  of  selected  parts 
of  reality  may  be  the  beginning  of  art,  as  narration  at 
first  accurate  may,  by  a  well-known  process,  insensibly 
grow  into  fiction  under  the  pressure  of  the  idea  of  the 
happening,  as  one  would  have  had  it  transpire.  To  find 
its  subjects  in  a  world  of  common  experience  is  a  neces¬ 
sity  for  an  undertaking  which,  like  art,  proposes  to  be 
commonly  understood ;  but  it  chooses  from  the  world  of 

2  For  this  reason  I  must  dissent  in  principle  from  one  of  the  most 
living  and  fundamental  of  contemporary  views  of  the  function  of  art, 
that  of  Mr.  Ralph  Adams  Cram.  The  era  of  individualism  in  art  which 
he  deplores  is  not  a  pure  retrogression,  it  is  a  necessary  ‘awkward 
period’  on  the  way  to  better  things.  Art  must  be  democratic  and  win 
its  own  clientele  of  free  admirers;  it  must  never  again  be  the  mere  out¬ 
growth  of  an  authoritatively  united  community  spirit.  It  must  serve 
as  one  of  the  main  paths  to  the  future  and  the  unborn. 


342 


ART  AND  RELIGION 


actuality  such  parts  as  foreshadow  a  happy  solution  of 
some  problem  of  evil  or  of  resistance  to  will.  It  picks 
out  objects  or  situations  in  which  we  can  see  or  sur¬ 
mise  the  raison  d’etre  of  ordinary  and  challenging 
facts, — of  inertia,  in  the  repose  of  a  majestic  peak;  of 
flesh,  in  the  face  of  a  girl;  of  human  bonds,  in  the 
Madonna;  of  suffering  itself,  in  tragedy  and  music. 
Bergson  was  essentially  right  in  saying  that  the  artist 
like  the  metaphysician  must,  through  the  disinterested 
vision  of  sympathy,  perceive  the  real.  The  objects 
which  art  portrays  are  individual  objects  with  a  penum¬ 
bra  of  universal  meaning ;  they  are  objects  which  admit 
us  to  a  perception  of  the  way  in  which  reality,  while 
resisting  our  wishes,  may  yet  satisfy  the  will. 

The  original  intention  of  art  may  well  be,  not  to 
satisfy  the  will,  but  to  prefigure  its  satisfaction.  As 
in  mimetic  dances,  which  are  at  the  same  time  prayers, 
art  may  serve  as  a  sort  of  first  aid  to  thought,  giving 
a  more  vivid  grasp  of  the  goal  of  desire.  Such  art  is 
frequently  a  collective  activity;  collectivity  heightens 
emotion ;  and  heightened  emotion  intensifies  the  imagi¬ 
native  presentation  of  the  objects  wished  for. 

But  the  characteristic  thing  about  art  is  that  in  this 
process  of  imaginative  presentation,  it  discovers  a 
secondary  satisfaction  which  eclipses  the  first.  The  one 
who  contemplates  and  enjoys  a  work  of  art  may  equally 
with  the  artist  find  his  insight  aided;  but  the  artist 
has  found  the  joy  of  authorship  in  an  object  which 
partakes  of  his  own  ideal.  There  are  many  objects 


AKT  AND  HUMAN  NATUKE 


343 


which  can  hardly  be  enjoyed  except  by  physical  posses¬ 
sion  :  to  the  hungry  man,  a  picture  of  food  would  bring 
little  pleasure  whether  painted  by  himself  or  some 
other.  But  art,  whose  mission  is  to  the  unsatisfied 
wishes,  may  safely  assume  that  it  has  to  do  with  the 
hungry  man  only  in  so  far  as  he  is  also  a  hungry  soul. 
The  objects  which  it  has  to  present  are  objects  whose 
nature  is  to  elude  physical  possession.  The  most  gen¬ 
eral  name  for  the  specific  objects  of  art  is  the  beautiful ; 
and  the  beautiful  may  be  defined  as  that  which  demands 
to  be  possessed  by  reproduction. 

It  has  often  been  said  that  the  contemplation  of 
beauty  is  quieting  to  the  will;  that  it  must  be  disin¬ 
terested,  free  from  the  clamor  for  personal  enjoyment. 
And  this  is  true  with  regard  to  every  activity  within 
the  private  or  the  public  order:  for  beauty  is  the 
presence  in  a  particular  object  of  a  value  which  cannot 
be  possessed  by  any  social  instinct.  But  the  cessation  of 
these  activities  is  the  initiation  of  another.  The  per- 
ceiver  of  beauty,  quite  unreflectively,  begins  the  effort 
to  produce  it  out  of  himself,  as  one  who  has  heard  music 
he  enjoys  may  find  himself  trying  to  whistle  it.  Nothing 
can  be  consciously  reproduced  unless  it  has  been 
thought  through ;  and  as  the  possession  of  beauty  must 
be  a  possession  by  conscious  thought,  the  work  of  re¬ 
production  may  be  regarded  as  the  act  of  taking  com¬ 
plete  possession.  Art  could  thus  be  described  as  the 
completion  of  the  possession  of  the  beautiful. 

And  so  far  as  the  element  of  value  in  beauty  is  a 
metaphysical  element,  a  solution  in  idea  of  some  prob¬ 
lem  of  evil,  it  is  in  actuality,  and  not  in  symbol  only, 


344 


ART  AND  RELIGION 


a  finished  satisfaction.  The  will  reaches  in  art  an  abso¬ 
lute  goal.  Hence  it  is  that  art  opens  to  some  minds  a 
career  whose  passion  is  capable  of  replacing  all  other 
passions.  The  artist  has  all  that  the  metaphysician  can 
give  him,  though  he  has  it  not  in  conceptual  form.  He 
has  all  that  ambition  and  love  can  give  him,  though 
he  has  it  not  in  the  coin  of  actual  recognition  and  affec¬ 
tion.  As  a  man  he  will  need  to  possess  his  object  also 
through  the  way  of  concepts  and  words,  and  of  recogni¬ 
tion  and  personal  attachment;  but  as  an  artist  he  has 
already  stood  at  the  end  of  these  paths :  he  has  antici¬ 
pated  the  attainment  of  his  will.  And  whether  or  not 
he  is  ‘indifferent  to  the  public ’ — his  immediate  public — 
he  is  conscious  in  his  achievement  of  the  necessary  and 
permanent  persuasive  power  of  a  vital  idea. 

II 

If  this  is  a  true  account  of  the  nature  of  art,  we  can 
understand  its  twofold  effect  upon  human  instinct. 
Since,  in  its  first  intention,  it  presents  the  objects  of 
desire  with  added  vividness,  it  strengthens  the  impulses 
to  possess,  is  capable  of  heightening  the  passions,  social 
and  unsocial.  Upon  the  spectator,  the  first  effect  of 
the  enjoyment  of  art  is  the  enlivening  of  his  wishes, 
restoring  a  perhaps  jaded  faith  in  their  achievableness 
and  in  the  general  worth  of  living.  And  since  he  has 
been  led  into  a  world  in  which  success  is  not  alone 
possible  but  actual,  immersion  in  that  world  as  a  spec¬ 
tator  might  easily  tend  simply  to  heighten  the  rate  of 
living,  to  increase  eagerness  and  demand,  while  lower¬ 
ing  patience  with  the  restraint  and  postponement  im- 


ABT  AND  HUMAN  NATUKE 


345 


posed  by  the  slow  processes  of  the  social  order.  It  is 
not  an  accident  that  communities  of  artists  and  art- 
lovers  tend  to  develop  occasional  antinomian  or  Bo¬ 
hemian  traits. 

But  while  every  artist  is  a  spectator,  every  spectator 
is  also  at  least  an  incipient  artist;  and  to  that  extent 
the  first  effect  of  art  is  superseded  by  the  second, — 
the  heightened  energies  of  action  are  transmuted  into 
energies  of  creativity.  The  full  and  normal  effect  of 
art  is  to  turn  all  impulses  into  the  channel  of  the 
creation  of  persuasive  beauty,  making  this  form  of  the 
will  to  power  their  ultimate  meaning. 

In  this  role  of  interpreting  instinct,  the  passion  for 
art  is  likely  to  find  itself  in  partial  opposition  to  the 
passion  of  the  public  order.  Concern  for  the  quality 
and  beauty  of  an  industrial  product  is  not  always  com¬ 
patible  with  concern  for  maximum  quantity  or  ex¬ 
change  value :  one  finds  in  France  to-day  a  dread  of  the 
transformation  of  national  life  which  may  be  imposed 
by  a  new-born  pressure  for  ‘  efficiency ’  as  a  result  of 
the  war.  With  the  passion  of  the  private  order  there 
is  no  such  opposition.  Sex-love  in  particular  parallels 
and  in  part  fuses  with  the  impulse  of  art-production; 
for  sex-love  includes  within  its  meaning  an  impulse 
to  take  possession  of  the  beautiful  by  reproducing  it, 
though  this  meaning  does  not  rise  to  the  same  level 
of  consciousness  as  in  art.  And  art  may  be  regarded 
as  a  mode  of  creativity,  in  which  the  will  to  power  not 
alone  controls  its  object,  but  fashions  its  very  sub¬ 
stance  and  form.  Hence  no  form  of  activity  so  com¬ 
pletely  and  directly  sublimates  the  awakening  instinct 


346 


ART  AND  RELIGION 


of  sex  as  activity  in  creative  imagination.  Art  is  par¬ 
ticularly  fitted  to  introduce  the  instinct  of  sex  to  the 
central  element  of  its  own  meaning.3 

Ill 

But  besides  the  direct  effect  of  art  on  instinct  by 
interpreting  it,  there  is  another  and  reflexive  effect 
upon  the  form  of  all  instinct-expression. 

The  artist  does  not  intentionally  generalize  the 
beauty  which  he  finds  in  a  particular  object  and  de¬ 
posits  in  another.  But  the  meaning  of  beauty  is  uni¬ 
versal,  and  cannot  be  confined  within  any  one  object, 
nor  within  any  one  medium.  Beauty  transfers  itself, 
within  the  mind,  from  one  medium  to  another;  its 
tendency  is  to  impose  its  principle  upon  every  output  of 
the  person.  It  may  not  be  true  that  every  painter  some 
time  writes  a  poem.  But  behavior ,  the  continuous 
product  of  the  will,  cannot  escape  the  impress  of  the 
spread  of  the  impulses  of  art.  Through  art  the  force 
of  analogy  in  the  mind  is  immensely  increased.  It  has 
become  a  prevalent  doctrine  in  educational  theory  that 
skill  acquired  in  one  department  of  knowledge  is  not 
transferable  to  another;  and  this  is  likely  to  he  true 
if  we  deprive  the  mind  of  all  aesthetic  interest  in  the 
activity  in  question.  But  interest  in  beauty  reaches 

3  Miss  Jane  Harrison  relates  that  “an  artist  deeply  in  love  with  his 
friend’s  wife  once  said,  ‘If  only  I  could  paint  her  and  get  what  I  want 
from  her,  I  could  bear  it.  ’  .  .  .  He  saw  that  through  art,  through  vision, 
through  detachment,  desire  might  be  slain,  and  the  man  within  him  find 
peace. }>  Should  we  not  rather  say  that  desire  might  thus  find  its  own 
meaning,  not  so  much  through  detachment  as  through  creative  possession, 
and  the  entire  will  of  him  find  what  it  wanted?  Art  and  Bitual,  p.  218. 


ART  AND  HUMAN  NATURE 


347 


the  central  current  of  the  will,  and  when  this  interest 
is  awakened  all  transference  of  skill  and  discipline  be¬ 
comes  natural.  It  is  the  nature  of  beauty  to  overflow 
departments  and  to  make  the  man  of  one  piece. 

Hence  it  is  that  the  most  common  impressions  of 
physical  form  are  translated  (so  naturally  that  we 
seldom  think  of  the  metaphor)  into  expressions  of 
character  types, — straight,  crooked,  upright,  sharp, 
square,  devious,  etc.  The  words  rude  and  refined,  taken 
over  from  artisanry,  summarize  the  series  of  these 
indirect  effects  of  art  on  the  expression  of  instinct.  It 
would  be  possible  to  particularize  these  effects  for  each 
of  the  instincts  and  passions;  but  a  few  sketchy  out¬ 
lines  must  suffice. 

1.  Since  art  trains  enthusiasm  to  the  performance 
of  definite  work,  it  illustrates  the  paradox  of  force 
acquired  through  restraint,  to  the  direct  advantage  of 
all  social  life.  The  subordination  of  dancers  to  the 
common  rhythm  and  music  is  a  condition  of  their  free 
self-expression;  and  public  life  if  it  presents  a  more 
complex  subordination  may  yet  benefit  by  the  analogy. 
The  will  to  power  is  easily  led,  in  simple  community 
life,  by  the  subtle  argument  of  ‘  harmony ’  into  the 
assumption  of  a  permanent  identity  of  interest  between 
the  individual  person  and  the  State.  This  assumption, 
as  was  natural  in  a  people  so  deeply  steeped  in  beauty, 
was  the  genius  of  Greek  social  life.  Increasing  con¬ 
sciousness  of  individual  self-interest  must  always 
come  into  such  a  scheme  as  a  disturbing  element;  and 
once  the  central  harmony  is  broken,  no  good-will  of 
separate  individuals  could  restore  the  identity  of  in- 


348 


ART  AND  RELIGION 


terest.  The  principle  is  not  a  sufficient  bond  for  politi¬ 
cal  life,  as  the  tragedy  of  Greece  may  show,  but  the 
appeal  to  a  common  consciousness  of  beauty  is  an  aid 
which  our  bald  democracies  cannot  afford  to  ignore. 
Public  architecture,  public  pageantry  and  masque,  the 
reverence  for  beauty  in  all  public  enterprises,  furnish 
an  indirect  argument  for  public  solidarity  of  incalcu¬ 
lable  scope. 

2.  In  private  relations,  the  interest  in  beauty  has 
something  more  than  decency  to  demand.  It  tends  of 
its  own  accord  to  invite  an  equality  between  the  part¬ 
ners,  since  harmony  is  disturbed  by  the  weakness  or 
suppression  of  one  of  the  voices.  Society  in  the 
narrower  sense  of  the  term  may  be  regarded  as  human 
intercourse  carried  on  under  the  dominance  of  the 
demand  for  beauty,  as  the  most  complex  of  the  impro¬ 
visatory  arts.  And  all  society  creates  for  its  own 
purposes  a  limited  world  from  which  extremes  of  in¬ 
equality  are  excluded.  But  the  standard  of  beauty  de¬ 
mands  no  permanence  in  any  human  relationship.  Art 
embodies  its  meaning  within  finite  and  framable  ob¬ 
jects;  and  it  has  no  other  disposition  for  the  history 
of  love.  The  tale  will  find  its  end :  its  passing  may  have 
its  own  melancholy  beauty.  Taken  by  itself  the  standard 
of  art  would  make  for  temporary  unions. 

It  is  not  reasonable  to  expect  from  this  indirect  and 
formal  bearing  of  art  on  instinct  a  sufficient  guidance 
of  life.  Taken  alone  it  would  subordinate  the  matter 
of  behavior  to  its  manner,  preferring  to  believe  that 
“All  vertus  be  closyde  in  curtasy.”  It  would  insist  on 
suavity  when  the  situation  might  well  demand  indigna- 


ART  AND  HUMAN  NATURE 


349 


tion  or  even  conflict.  It  has  no  place  for  the  prophet, 
the  revolutionist,  the  reformer;  and  it  has  but  feeble 
contact  with  the  more  pressing  problems  of  the  ‘com¬ 
mon  man.’  It  fits  no  one  for  dealing  with  the  as  yet 
unharmonizable  aspects  of  experience.4  Its  tendency 
would  be  to  seclude  itself,  build  for  itself  high  garden 
walls,  and  in  the  midst  of  a  world  small  enough  to  be 
perfectly  controlled,  forget  the  ugly,  the  squalid,  the 
disordered,  the  just  causes  for  warfare  and  rebellion. 

If  made  an  exclusive  object  of  devotion,  beauty 
would  fail  at  length  to  satisfy  the  capacity  for  mal- 
adaptation.  When  it  so  far  assumes  leadership  in  the 
mind  as  to  dominate  the  religious  consciousness,  it 
loses  its  power.  The  gods  themselves  become  plastic 
figures  and  lend  themselves  to  the  fabrications  of  myth 
and  legend.  Their  severity  wanes  in  an  Olympian  sun¬ 
shine  ;  and  the  gibe  of  Epicurus  holds  good,  that  these 
gods  can  no  longer  be  supposed  to  wrinkle  their  brows 
in  concern  for  human  affairs.  To  exclude  in  this  way 
the  cruelty  and  hardness  of  fact  from  the  view  of  an 
aesthetized  consciousness  is  but  to  invite  the  day  of 
wrath,  when  reality  will  burst  down  those  walls  and 
turn  the  unearned  paradise  to  a  place  of  loathing. 

The  real  artist  knows  that  to  yield  to  the  aristocratic 
impulse  in  the  aesthetic  consciousness  is  to  cut  off  the 
sources  of  his  own  art.  For  beauty,  let  me  repeat,  is 
reality  offering  a  glimpse  of  the  solution  of  its  own 

4  There  is  probably  nothing  to  be  done  in  the  world  which  cannot  be 
done  with  entire  decorousness,  ideally  speaking,  but  for  men  of  imperfect 
skill,  promptitude,  and  invention  it  is  sometimes  necessary  to  choose 
between  decorum  and  the  demand  of  an  occasion,  between  futility,  even 
dishonor,  and  rudeness. 


350 


ART  AND  RELIGION 


problems  of  evil :  its  soil  is  in  experience.  It  must  lean 
against  its  own  luxury,  its  sensitiveness  and  finesse. 
It  must  return  from  time  to  time  to  the  school  of  asceti¬ 
cism  and  religion. 


CHAPTER  XXXIX 


RELIGION  PER  SE 


>  art  becomes  secular  and  declares  independence, 


jLm.  and  as  law  becomes  civil  and  increasingly  chary 
of  the  remnants  of  priestly  jurisdiction,  religion  is  left 
with  the  sphere  of  the  supernatural  as  its  special  prov¬ 
ince.  It  deals  with  what  is  behind,  beyond,  beneath,  and 
within  the  world ;  standing  in  contrast  with  all  that  is 
apparent,  finite,  and  controllable  by  systematic  thought. 

When  the  divine  element,  formerly  fused  with  science 
as  sacred  lore,  with  law  as  sacred  custom  and  precept, 
and  with  art  as  sacred  rite,  song,  and  story,  is  thus  set 
forth  in  its  separate  character,  it  seems  a  strangely 
empty  essence,  a  mystery,  a  mere  nothing, — for  which, 
nevertheless,  the  most  extravagant  claims  are  made. 
When  an  attempt  is  made  to  describe  or  deal  with  it, 
it  is  necessary  to  fall  back  on  fragments  of  thought, 
command,  and  symbol,  and  yet  to  deny  that  these  con¬ 
tain  what  is  intrinsically  uncontainable  in  such  vessels. 

With  better  understanding  it  becomes  known  that 
these  words  of  contrast,  “behind,  beyond/ ’  etc.,  indi¬ 
cate  the  relation  of  a  life  to  its  manifestations ;  as  the 
life  of  an  animal  might  be  said  to  be  behind  its  behavior 
the  invisible  and  elusive  source  of  its  manifestations. 
The  divine  is  empty  as  the  self  apart  from  its  ‘  experi¬ 
ence  ’  is  empty.  The  domain  of  religion  in  fact  is  a  divine 
self,  a  Spirit  which  is  as  Subject  to  all  finite  things, 


352 


ART  AND  RELIGION 


persons,  and  arts  as  Object,  and  presumably  to  much 
else  that  these  categories  do  not  include.  The  signifi¬ 
cance  of  religion  comes  from  the  assumption  that  all 
the  forces  of  the  world  are  drawn  together  in  foci  which 
we  call  personalities  or  spirits;  and  these  ultimately 
into  one.  It  would  be  possible  to  deal  with  the  whole 
of  force,  the  Supreme  Power,  as  religion  proposes  to 
deal  with  it  only  if  this  immense  reality  had  its  simple 
center,  its  I-am  and  I-will.  In  religion  the  will  of  man 
seeks  union  with  the  simple  center  of  power  which  is 
‘beyond’  and  ‘within’  the  world  as  the  will  of  the  world. 

The  extravagant  claim  of  religion  has  been  that  union 
with  God  is  itself  a  good,  and  indeed,  the  supreme  and 
sufficient  satisfaction  of  the  will.  But  even  if  we  can 
catch  some  hint  of  the  metaphysical  mystery  of  the 
religious  domain,  this  claim  is  a  new  mystery.  It  is  not 
obvious  that  union  with  anything  is  a  supreme  good, 
unless  union  means  an  alliance  with  the  power  therein 
vested.  But  religion  has  set  its  good  in  opposition  to  all 
other  goods ;  it  has  turned  its  back  upon  the  world  in 
which  the  power  of  the  gods  themselves  is  manifested. 
It  has  renounced  the  world ;  and  it  has  testified  to  the 
literalness  of  its  intention  by  the  most  thorough  as¬ 
ceticism.  In  its  separation  from  art  and  from  society, 
religion  appears  as  the  hostile  critic  of  both,  competing 
with  them  for  the  centering  of  human  affections.  De¬ 
spite  all  this,  some  human  beings  have  found  in  reli¬ 
gion,  as  others  have  found  in  art,  a  career  animated 
by  a  passion  able  to  displace  all  others. 

It  is  of  course  impossible  for  any  one  to  live  in  the 


RELIGION  PER  SE 


353 


world  and  maintain  a  complete  enmity  toward  the 
goods  of  the  world,  the  natural  objects  of  his  instinctive 
wishes.  To  live,  hating  life,  even  if  for  duty’s  sake  one 
continued  to  eat,  would  be  a  slow  suicide.  There  is 
strictly  no  such  thing  as  ‘ thorough  asceticism.’  Exter¬ 
nally,  the  position  of  the  religious  devotee  is  anoma¬ 
lous:  he  renounces  society,  family,  the  State,  yet  he 
enjoys  the  wealth,  the  friendship,  the  peace,  provided 
by  others.  His  position  has  therefore  been  called  para¬ 
sitic  and  insincere.  On  Kantian  grounds  he  is  immoral 
— so  it  might  appear — for  he  cannot  universalize  his 
own  maxim. 

So  it  appears;  but  the  appearance  is  mistaken.  It 
is  plausible  only  because  one  forgets  that  all  living 
things  have  to  renew  their  life  from  time  to  time  by 
turning  away  from  life,  as  one  turns  from  waking  to 
sleeping  for  the  sake  of  being  the  more  awake.  If  it 
is  true  that  art  and  all  social  activities  make  use  of  a 
kind  of  capital  whose  source  lies  outside  themselves, 
it  would  follow  that  one  who  had  no  other  interest  at 
heart  than  these  would  still  be  obliged  by  the  nature 
of  things  alternately  to  pursue  them  and  turn  away 
from  them.1  Not  alone  individuals,  but  all  art  and  all 
institutions  must  save  their  lives  by  losing  them.  And 
he  that  apparently  renounces  them  all  may  be  the  one 
who  is  doing  most  for  their  conservation.2 

1  The  theory  of  this  necessary  alternation  is  worked  out  more  fully 
in  The  Meaning  of  God,  chapters  xxviii,  xxxi,  xxxii.  See  also  R.  C. 
Cabot,  What  Men  Live  By,  Part  IV,  Worship. 

2  The  argument  is  that  there  must  be  a  distinct  place  in  the  economy 
of  life  for  the  cult  of  the  absolute  in  its  contrast  with  life,  and  if 
religion  is  the  name  of  this  place,  the  instinctive  motive  of  religion 


354 


ART  AND  RELIGION 


As  for  art,  we  have  already  seen  that  it  depends  npon 
an  eye  for  realities.  The  artist  lives  by  what  he  can 
truly  see ;  and  his  eye  for  reality  needs  to  be  quickened 
now  and  again,  not  by  gazing  harder  into  his  work,  but 
by  turning  to  a  region  in  which  the  perception  of  reality 
is  simple  and  immediate.  Such  a  region  the  individual 
artist  is  likely  to  find  in  social  intercourse ;  for  the  most 
part,  persons  are  the  relatively  real  and  relatively 
available  sources  of  all  restoring  of  vision.  But  per¬ 
sonal  intercourse  itself  wears  thin  and  shallow  unless 
it  reverts  to  its  own  basis ;  all  harks  back  at  length  to  the 
absolute,  to  religion.  Whether  at  first  or  second  hand, 
the  artist  is  pensioner  upon  the  bounty  of  the  mystic, 
and  not  vice  versa .  The  great  ages  of  religion  have  pre¬ 
ceded  the  great  ages  of  art,  and  of  science  also,  for 
they  were  attending  to  the  fertilization  of  the  ground. 

As  for  society  and  the  State,  it  is  the  death  of  every 
institution  when  it  begins  to  regard  itself  as  self-suffi¬ 
cient  or  worthy  of  devotion  in  its  own  right.  The  only 
State  that  has  a  chance  to  survive  upon  this  planet  is 
the  State  that  knows  that  its  power  is  not  in  itself,  nor 
its  right.  If  the  Sabbath  was  made  for  man,  so  is  the 
State.  And  the  only  obedience  that  can  serve  any  State 
well  is  the  obedience  of  men  who  are  servants  of  a 
Greater.  If  religion  taught  men  how  to  be  independent 
of  the  State,  in  an  age  when  the  State  was  everything, 
it  might  well  appear  anti-political;  and  yet  from  the 
spoils  of  this  rebellion  it  has  generated  the  modern 


would  be  a  specific  craving  due,  whether  so  understood  or  not,  to  the 
atrophy  of  social  and  aesthetic  values,  a  craving  for  the  restoration  of 
creative  power. 


KELIGION  PEE  SE 


355 


State,  the  State  of  free  individuals,  which  is  a  far 
greater  thing.  The  Roman  type  of  State  has  lost  its 
life  in  trying  to  assert  it,  as  such  States  always  will — 
but  the  State  lives — the  State  that  has  learned  to  sub¬ 
ordinate  its  sovereign  I-will  to  the  will  of  God,  which 
under  certain  conditions  may  be  discerned  in  the  will 
of  the  people. 

For  let  us  not  mistake  the  meaning  of  liberalism  and 
democracy:  they  do  not  mean  that  atomic  individuals 
and  their  inherent  rights  are  to  be  put  above  the  com¬ 
munity  and  its  welfare,  nor  that  any  and  every  majority 
is  right.  They  mean  that  the  individual  who  finds  and 
worships  his  God  stands  at  the  source  of  the  community 
and  its  welfare.  It  is  to  the  God-fearing  individual  and 
no  other  that  the  State  must  defer.  And  conversely, 
democracy  without  religion  is  neither  a  true  nor  a  se¬ 
cure  principle  of  social  structure. 

We  thus  recognize  that  religion,  just  in  so  far  as  it 
understands  its  own  business,  must  insist  on  its  con¬ 
trast  with  all  social  goods,  must  have  its  asceticism 
and  other-worldliness,  can  never  come  in  the  guise  of 
a  social  code.  Those  who  accuse  Christianity,  for  ex¬ 
ample,  of  having  no  social  code,  may  be  bearing  indirect 
witness  to  the  fact  that  it  knows  the  proper  work  of 
religion  per  se.  Religion  has  no  choice  but  to  place  the 
child  in  man,  the  total  unexpressed  self,  above  the  ins ti- 7 
tution;  and  to  provide  for  that  self  a  kingdom  not  of 
this  world.  For,  after  all,  this  Child  is  the  strongest 
thing  in  the  world,  and  no  human  interest  can  be  strong 
or  even  safe  which  does  not  first  do  it  reverence.  The 
sacred  law  already  perceived  that  the  weak  in  man  must 


356 


ART  AND  RELIGION 


control  society.  Eeligion  cast  loose  from  the  law  singles 
out  this  divine  spark  as  that  upon  which  every  hnman 
value  depends  for  its  life. 

It  is  because  of  this  relation  to  creativity  that  reli¬ 
gion,  in  the  mere  ‘  union  with  God/  has  been  able  to 
satisfy  the  will  to  power  in  those  who  have  understood 
its  paradox.  And  for  the  most  part  asceticism,  while 
renouncing  power  of  one  sort,  has  been  regarded  as  a 
way  to  power  of  another  sort.  It  has  been  a  repression 
of  partial  expressions  of  the  will  in  the  interest  of  the 
whole ;  hence  its  total  effect  has  been  one  of  sublimation, 
not  of  repression  of  the  will  to  power.  In  the  history 
of  religious  asceticism  this  fact  has  been  more  or  less 
clearly  perceived:  the  devotees  are  not  historically 
describable  as  men  devoid  of  ambition ;  they  have  aimed 
at  that  supreme  sort  of  power  which  works  without 
tools,  without  violence,  without  self-assertion  or  com¬ 
petition,  yet  irresistibly,  because  all  other  powers  are 
derivative  or  relatively  unreal. 

Thus  in  Yedantism.  Brahmanism  in  this  form  aban¬ 
dons  its  interest  in  the  deed  and  the  law,  and,  as  in  the 
religion  of  Spinoza,  empties  all  passion  into  the  will  to 
know.  Bjit  the  will  to  know  is,  in  this  form  of  religion, 
equivalent  to  the  will  to  power ;  for,  as  it  teaches,  there 
is  no  power  in  the  world  save  the  power  of  knowledge 
sub  specie  ceternitatis ,  the  power  of  knowledge  that  I 
(and  every  particular  being)  am  Brahm.  This  is  the 
power  that  can  strike  off  the  chains  of  reincarnation; 
in  it  all  lesser  powers  are  believed  to  be  included. 

Buddhism  still  more  completely  and  subtly  defines 


RELIGION  PER  SE 


357 


the  goal  of  all  passion  as  a  passionless  transparency 
of  seeing.  It  attacks  the  self-element  in  all  desire,  de¬ 
manding  that  the  individual  organism  shall  become  the 
instrument  of  a  perfect  universality  of  indifference,  to 
which  neither  existence  nor  yet  non-existence  shall  ap¬ 
pear  as  an  object  of  strife.  For  even  in  the  determined 
rejection  of  existence  by  the  Brahmanic  ideal  a  love 
for  being  lies  concealed.  It  is  evident,  nevertheless, 
that  this  position  is  attractive  to  the  Buddhist  because 
of  the  initiation  which  it  represents  into  the  very  mov¬ 
ing  principles  of  the  cosmos ;  the  love  of  power  has  not 
disappeared  into  something  else,  but  has  taken  the  form 
of  an  aspiration  for  metaphysical  status  with  all  the 
power  over  one’s  own  destiny  (and  over  other  men’s 
minds)  therein  implied. 

Mediaeval  asceticism  is  at  once  less  philosophic  and 
more  self-conscious.  It  has  classified  its  own  enemies — 
its  tempters — with  greater  social  insight,  if  not  with 
keener  psychological  discrimination.  It  is  driven  to  its 
aloofness  neither  by  Paul  nor  by  Plato,  but  by  its  own 
original  self-scrutiny  as  we  find  it,  for  example,  in 
Augustine.  It  was  bound  to  declare  war  on  the  lust  of 
the  flesh,  the  lust  of  the  eyes,  and  the  pride  of  life,  be¬ 
cause  of  its  own  knowledge  of  the  inadequacy  of  these 
goods  to  define  the  good  of  their  own  spirits.  And  if  we 
may  venture  to  interpret  the  recesses  of  the  conscious¬ 
ness  of  the  mediaeval  saints,  as  they  made  their  painful 
and  glorious  itinerarium  mentis  in  Deum ,  it  was  not 
without  its  own  form  of  the  will  to  power.  Francis  of 
Assisi  has  admitted  us  far  into  the  mystery  of  saint¬ 
hood  in  his  confession  of  his  unwillingness  to  find  any 


358 


ART  AND  RELIGION 


beggar  more  poor  than  he.  For  he  was  the  jealous  lover 
of  his  lady  Poverty;  and  through  this  devotion  he 
claimed  the  devotion  of  others.  Asceticism  for  these 
men,  as  for  the  ascetics  of  all  ages,  had  the  value  of  a 
demonstration  in  which  the  surrounding  souls  were 
necessary  adjuncts.  It  intended  to  demonstrate  that  the 
religious  satisfaction  is  an  adequate  substitute  for  all 
others;  and  therewith  to  announce  a  power  of  which 
the  conquest  of  ordinary  desire  is  a  natural  expression. 
To  be  able  to  endure  is  the  badge  of  the  entrance  of  the 
divine  into  the  life  of  the  flesh ;  it  was  a  symptom  of  a 
metaphysical  achievement  which  carried  with  it  an  as¬ 
cendency  over  the  spirits  of  men. 

This  ideal  is  sufficiently  discredited ;  what  we  need  to 
point  out  is  that  its  errors  are  errors  of  insufficiency, 
not  of  a  false  direction.  So  far  as  human  lust,  greed, 
pugnacity,  and  the  quest  of  social  power  were  con¬ 
cerned,  the  religious  ascetic  has  moved  as  one  not  see¬ 
ing  them  in  others,  not  admitting  them  into  himself, 
and  so  not  solving  the  problems  which  they  raised.  In 
the  community  which  punished  guilt  he  could  with  diffi¬ 
culty  play  his  part,  for  the  logic  of  pugnacity  had  been 
put  behind  him  and  forgotten.  His  religion  had  too  far 
lost  the  sense  of  the  institution  and  of  the  law  to  have 
part  in  their  development.  Hence  religion  in  his  form 
alone  could  neither  leaven  the  community  nor  sustain 
itself ;  and  so  it  largely  failed  of  the  power  which  was 
its  own  inward  nerve  and  passion. 

It  did  not  entirely  fail.  In  the  forms  we  have  men¬ 
tioned,  it  has  afforded  much  of  the  independent  reality 
and  freedom  which  the  will  needs ;  it  has  not  been  in- 


RELIGION  PER  SE 


359 


fertile.  But  worked-in  as  it  has  always  been  with  the 
social  life  it  has  rejected,  its  organic  relations  thereto 
have  been  obscnre,  its  ‘ moral  substance’  thin,  and  the 
*  objective  arena’  for  the  will  to  power  evanescent.  It 
is  an  essential  part  of  religion,  religion  per  se  in  its 
contrast  with  the  rest  of  life:  it  is  not  the  whole  of 
religion.  What  religion  may  mean  for  the  transforma¬ 
tion  of  instinct  must  be  sought  in  a  more  positive 
religious  type. 


' 


PART  VII 


CHRISTIANITY 


CHAPTER  XL 


WHAT  CHRISTIANITY  REQUIRES 

MOST  rules  of  life,  secular  or  sacred,  undertake 
to  regulate  behavior:  they  are  addressed  to  the 
expression  of  instinct  in  action.  But  when  original 
Christianity  sums  up  its  rule  of  life,  it  addresses  itself 
to  the  feelings  or  affections.  Its  language  is,  Thou 
shalt  love  .  .  . ;  or,  If  any  man  come  to  me,  and  hate 
not  his  father  .  .  .  yea,  and  his  own  life  also,  he 
cannot  be  my  disciple.  Men  are  enjoined  to  1  abhor 
that  which  is  evil,’  to  4 set  their  affections  on  things 
above. ’  It  attacks  what  McDougall  calls  the  second, 
or  middle,  region  of  instinct,  not  the  third :  the  emotion, 
not  the  response. 

The  command  of  love  to  God  and  to  neighbor  is  not 
new  in  Christianity :  it  is  taken  over  from  the  code  of 
Deuteronomy,  where  it  occurs  among  many  other  pre¬ 
cepts.  What  is  new  is  the  selective  principle  which 
lighted  upon  this  requirement  as  the  central  and  essen¬ 
tial  thing.  And  such  a  change  of  focus  is  a  new  moral 
venture ;  for  one  is  committed  to  all  the  corollaries  that 
can  be  drawn  from  one’s  first  principle,  and  it  is  in 
them  that  its  novel  power  and  bearing  will  first  appear. 

The  Sermon  on  the  Mount  may  be  regarded  as  a 
mass  of  such  corollaries.  Many  of  these  sayings  deal 
directly  with  expressions  of  pugnacity,  others  with  the 
love  of  the  sexes,  others  with  ambition.  And  they  re- 


364 


CHRISTIANITY 


tain,  for  the  most  part,  the  peculiarity  of  the  first 
principle;  their  author  regards  himself  as  departing 
from  tradition  precisely  in  this,  that  the  requirement 
is  transferred  from  the  outward  appearance  to  the 
heart.  Adultery  is  defined  not  in  terms  of  conduct,  but 
in  terms  of  wish ;  murder  is  defined  in  terms  of  anger. 
And  by  way  of  hedging  off  the  instinctive  tendency  to 
evade  self-examination  by  relying  on  social  approval, 
it  is  particularly  enjoined  that  all  supposed  righteous¬ 
ness  be  kept  hidden  from  the  admiring  eyes  of  men, — 
including  oneself.  It  is  commonly  taken  as  character¬ 
istic  of  Christianity  that  it  is  concerned  first  of  all  for 
the  ‘  inside  of  the  cup. ’ 

But  there  is  something  psychologically  awry  in  a 
command  to  feel.  It  may  be  taken  as  evident  that  a 
person  cannot  at  will  love  his  neighbor,  still  less,  his 
enemy.  My  feelings,  of  course,  are  my  own,  my  most 
intimate  property,  and  most  property  I  can  exchange 
or  revise :  but  these  possessions  are  not  alienable  nor 
directly  alterable ;  they  are  closely  identical  with  what 
I  am,  and  hence  appear  to  me  as  something  given, 
inevitable.  What  I  dislike,  I  dislike,  and  there  is  no 
help  for  it.  Spencer  accepts  this  fact  as  marking  the 
limit  of  human  freedom.  If  freedom  means  doing  as 
we  please,  then  we  have  freedom  without  limit;  the 
trouble  is  (as  we  see  when  we  reflect)  we  can  do  nothing 
else, — and  we  cannot  please  as  we  please.  Hence  a  com¬ 
mand  to  hate  or  to  love  seems,  taken  literally,  to  re¬ 
quire  the  impossible. 

The  interpreters  commonly  surmount  this  difficulty 
by  giving  the  words  for  feeling  a  practical  meaning. 


WHAT  CHRISTIANITY  REQUIRES 


365 


To  love  one’s  neighbor,  it  is  said,  has  nothing  to  do 
with  subjective  or  pathological  states ;  we  are  simply 
called  upon  to  perform  those  acts  and  assume  those 
attitudes  which  would  express  good-will  if  we  had  it. 
We  are  to  behave  ‘as  if’  we  loved  our  neighbor.  The 
rule  of  love  is  a  rule  of  service.  If  I  want  to  know 
what  love  would  do  in  any  case,  the  golden  rule  sup¬ 
plies  complete  directions  without  calling  upon  any 
feelings  except  those  of  natural  egoism:  let  me  think 
what  I  would  want;  then  imaginatively  reverse  the 
situation  and  act  accordingly,  “for  this  is  the  law  and 
the  prophets.”  Thus  the  new  principle  becomes,  like 
the  old,  a  matter  of  conduct:  the  stroke  of  genius  lies 
in  the  induction  which  finds  the  single  simple  principle, 
and  establishes  it  in  supreme  control.  It  is  through 
this  philosophic  mastery  and  sweep  that  the  new  right¬ 
eousness  exceeds  the  righteousness  of  the  scribes  and 
pharisees.  Thus  the  law  of  love  is  interpreted  prag¬ 
matically  ;  love  is  as  love  does. 

Is  it  possible  that  this  pragmatic  interpretation  may 
exactly  miss  the  characteristic  thing  about  Chris¬ 
tianity  by  pouring  back  into  behavior  that  which  the 
new  idea  proposed  to  lift  out  of  it?  Can  I  with  any 
great  success  assume  toward  my  neighbor  a  type  of 
action  in  independence  of  my  feeling?  Granting  the 
James-Lange  theory  of  emotion  its  utmost,  I  may 
acquire  a  genial  and  kindly  habit  of  mind  which  will 
serve  to  overcome  social  friction;  but  I  should  fear 
the  moral  result  of  a  determined  benevolence  of  bear¬ 
ing.  Have  we  not  seen  enough  of  the  officialized  Chris- 


366 


CHRISTIANITY 


tian  manner!  Certainly,  in  the  extreme  case,  to  force 
a  mould  of  philanthropic  action  over  a  rebellious  gorge 
could  hardly  claim  for  itself  the  sublime  spontaneity 
of  soul  which  is  represented  as  saying  in  surprise, 

4  4  Lord,  when  saw  we  thee  an  hungered  and  fed  thee ! ’  ’ 
Strangely  enough,  this  whole  pragmatic  interpretation 
smacks  rather  of  Kant  than  of  the  sage  of  Nazareth. 
What  if  the  demand  of  Christianity  were  intentionally 
and  literally  addressed  to  the  affections  ? 

The  apparent  psychological  impossibility,  I  confess, 
seems  to  me  quite  in  harmony  with  the  general  temper 
of  this  religion.  Under  the  guise  of  extreme  simplicity, 
it  repeatedly  demands  the  unattainable.  Thus  in  order 
to  enter  the  kingdom  of  heaven,  one  has  hut  to  become 
as  a  little  child.  Rebirth,  or  conversion,  for  Chris¬ 
tianity,  means  a  recovery  of  something  which  children 
have  not  yet  lost.  It  might  not  occur  to  us  to  regard 
a  child  as  a  lover  either  of  God  or  of  man,  but  the  child 
is  certainly  not  a  pragmatic  servant :  what  can  be  said 
of  him  is  that  he  has  not  crossed  the  Rubicon  of  that 
analytic  and  utilitarian  intelligence  which  can  think 
of  persons  as  means  and  means  only, — with  all  his 
puny  self-assertion,  his  original  sympathy  with  his 
enveloping  personal  world  has  not  been  broken.  But 
we  have  crossed  that  Rubicon,  and  to  recover  the  direct¬ 
ness  of  relation  of  the  child  is  not  more  easy  than  to 
4  love  ’  in  any  other  sense.  It  is  hardly  more  easy  than 
to  be  perfect, — and  it  is  written,  4  4  Be  ye  therefore 
perfect.” 

As  I  understand  Christianity,  it  needs  little  inter¬ 
pretation,  for  it  means  as  nearly  as  possible  what  it 


WHAT  CHRISTIANITY  REQUIRES 


367 


says.  It  intends  to  state  its  requirement  in  terms  of  a 
complete  transformation  of  the  instincts ;  it  is  on  this 
account  that  it  has  for  us  an  extreme  theoretical  in¬ 
terest.  We  shall  consider  how  it  proposes  to  deal  with 
the  major  passions  of  the  private  and  the  public  orders. 


CHAPTER  XLI 


CHRISTIANITY  AND  PUGNACITY 

THERE  is  no  better  test  of  any  rule  of  life  than 
its  way  of  settling  accounts  with  pugnacity.  For 
pugnacity  is  the  instinctive  agent  of  readjustment,  es¬ 
pecially  of  the  deeper  and  abrupter  readjustments:  if 
human  nature  were  so  far  transformed  that  there  were 
no  more  readjustments  to  be  made,  within  or  without, 
pugnacity  would  of  necessity  disappear.  The  last  con¬ 
quest  of  pugnacity,  before  reaching  the  ideal  state, 
would  be  the  conquest  of  itself. 

I 

In  society  as  we  find  it,  the  dialectic  of  experience 
has  made  a  certain  level  of  transformation  of  pugnacity 
habitual.  It  was  only  as  the  disposition  to  rush  into 
strife  was  tamed  that  society  on  an  ample  scale  became 
possible.  And  society  abets  this  dialectic  both  by  its 
rules  and  by  making  an  adequate  provision  for  all. 
Where  there  is  plenty,  men  may  be  persuaded  to  accept 
their  allotment  in  peace  (so  long  as  they  have  faith  in 
the  fairness  of  the  allotment) ;  but  where  there  is 
scarcity  or  the  suspicion  of  injustice,  there  is  a  tendency 
to  revert  to  the  primitive  methods,  with  their  risks  and 
hopes.  But  the  most  orderly  and  successful  society  is 
still  surcharged  with  pugnacious  behavior  in  various 


CHRISTIANITY  AND  PUGNACITY 


369 


‘  moral  equivalents.  ’  Apart  from  competition,  discus¬ 
sion,  and  various  sorts  of  peaceful  rivalry,  there  is  the 
pervasive  activity  of  the  critical  judgment.  Wrath 
against  defective  persons  and  institutions,  by  being 
circuited  through  the  processes  of  conceptual  thought, 
is  made  over  into  an  energy  for  their  repair  rather  than 
their  destruction.  Criticism,  armed  with  various  weap¬ 
ons  of  peaceful  efficiency,  is  the  social  ultimate  in  the 
transforming  of  pugnacity. 

I  say  the  social  ultimate,  for  the  injunction  of  Chris¬ 
tianity,  “ Judge  not,”  cannot  be  observed  in  human 
society.  Not  alone  because  progress  depends  on  the 
perpetual  work  of  this  negative  impulse,  with  others; 
but  also  because  to  be  accurately  judged  and  measured 
is  a  vital  interest  of  every  self-conscious  being.  He 
who  wants  power  wants  self-knowledge;  and  he  who 
wants  self-knowledge  wants  criticism,  whether  or  not 
he  likes  it.  It  is  an  essential  ingredient  of  that  craving 
for  intercourse  with  our  kind  which  we  sometimes  dub 
the  ‘ instinct  of  sociability’  that  we  anticipate  this 
mutual  appraisal,  “sizing  up,”  incipient  locking  of 
horns,  the  Carlylian  question,  ‘  ‘  Can  I  kill  thee  or  canst 
thou  kill  me  ?  ” ;  though  all  such  valuing  and  appraising 
implies  placing  in  a  series,  a  denial  of  absolute  worth 
in  the  respect  measured,  reduction  from  an  end  to  a 
means. 

It  is  in  the  ‘hard’  public  order  that  the  activity  of 
the  critical  judgment  is  most  evident;  for  there  the 
standards  are  most  objective  and  definite.  But  the  criti¬ 
cal  judgment  of  the  private  order  is  most  searching. 
Here  it  takes  a  form  which,  for  lack  of  a  general  name, 


370 


CHKISTIANITY 


we  may  call  education  in  its  widest  sense.  Education,  in 
this  sense,  is  not  simply  a  deliberate  transaction  which 
takes  place  between  one  generation  and  another.  It  oc¬ 
curs  whenever  two  human  beings  are  associated,  and 
without  necessary  intention.  It  is  the  transaction 
through  which,  by  a  hundred  avenues  of  expression,  A’s 
total  consciousness  of  B  becomes  a  part  of  B *s  self-con¬ 
sciousness.  This  transaction  is  always  selective,  always 
critical,  and  always  mutual. 

Ideals  of  education  are  held  before  us  in  which  no 
adverse  criticism  should  appear,  but  all  be  positive  and 
encouraging.  And  so  far  as  the  expressing  of  our  judg¬ 
ment  is  concerned,  it  is  a  principle  of  the  greatest  use 
(because  it  is  nearer  the  truth)  to  dwell  on  what  persons 
are  rather  than  on  what  they  are  not.  It  is  also  a  valu¬ 
able  principle  to  express  few  judgments  rather  than 
many.  But  these  are  questions  of  art,  not  of  substance : 
and  in  regard  to  the  substance  of  the  social  judgment, 
it  is  vain  to  evade  the  negative  element,  however  it  is 
conveyed.  For  the  negative  element  is  there ;  we  must 
be  true  to  our  own  aversions.  And  further,  we  cannot 
outwit  the  need  of  it  in  the  dynamics  of  education:  to 
be  conscious,  sometimes  acutely,  of  what  we  are  steer¬ 
ing  from,  is  a  part  of  our  knowledge  of  what  we  are 
steering  to;  and  the  elemental  spurs  of  fear  and  rue 
and  pain  are  the  ever  present  obverses  of  our  hope 
and  confidence.  An  assumed  uncondemning  or  wholly 
beaming  attitude,  unless  it  retains  the  permanent  pos¬ 
sibility  of  instant  challenge,  becomes  an  affectation  of 
the  godlike  which  departs  more  or  less  from  the  veri¬ 
table  and  evokes  a  like  departure  in  the  addressee,  rob- 


CHRISTIANITY  AND  PUGNACITY 


371 


bing  intercourse  of  reality  and  minimizing  the  meaning 
of  all  language. 

The  most  effective  educating  agencies  known  to  us 
are  free  from  all  conscious  scruples  on  tbe  score  of 
criticism.  They  are  the  spontaneous  activities  of  those 
who  have  just  emerged  from  some  stage  of  relative 
defect,  and  take  a  corresponding  intensity  of  interest  in 
denouncing  that  stage  in  others.  The  boy  who  has  just 
now  learned  to  swim  cannot  sufficiently  emphasize  the 
contrast  between  himself  and  those  who  still  flounder 
in  the  water.  Without  this  temper  and  its  sting,  the 
world  of  boys  would  be  robbed  of  its  immense  develop¬ 
ing  power,  and,  at  the  same  time,  of  its  attraction:  it 
is  this  temper  that  creates  around  the  horizon  of  effort 
a  surcharged  sense  of  the  importance  of  just  this 
achievement.  Under  this  pressure  the  latent  powers 
rise  sufficiently  high  to  leap  the  barrier:  a  little  less 
concern  may  mean  permanent  failure  to  meet  the  last 
inch  of  the  requirement,  and  hence  to  find  what  one’s 
powers  actually  are.  Nowhere  could  society  afford  to 
dispense  with  the  zeal  of  recent  converts,  with  their 
unsullied  sense  of  the  magnitude  of  their  achievement. 
Their  estimate  is  probably  truer  than  ours  who  look 
on  from  a  greater  distance;  for  who  most  justly  ap¬ 
preciates  the  length  of  a  mile, — he  who  remembers  it 
after  a  day’s  rest,  or  he  who  has  just  finished  the  last 
of  twenty  f  We  cannot  always  secure  for  our  own  efforts 
the  notable  spur  of  necessity,  nor  do  we  forever  need  it; 
but  if  we  are  deprived  of  the  lash  of  a  sufficiently  criti¬ 
cal  social  judgment,  we  instinctively  try  to  replace  it 
by  invented  task-masters  within  ourselves.  And  until 


r 


372  CHKISTIANIT  Y 

we  shall  have  finished  onr  education  to  the  extent  of 
ceasing  to  be  social  beings,  this  replacement  is  never 
quite  complete. 

Thus  society  expects  its  members  to  be  critical  of 
one  another,  both  in  personal  and  official  relations, 
while  conscious  of  the  dominant  power  of  the  positive 
social  bond.  The  health  of  social  movement  depends 
on  the  maintenance  by  individual  wills  of  a  certain 
distance  or  alienation  from  all  that  invites  to  total  ac¬ 
quiescence,  or  absolute  social  satisfaction.1  Nor  is  there 
any  necessary  kinship  between  an  aliveness  to  defect, 
which  is  the  very  engine  of  personal  growth,  and  a 
cynical  temper.  But  it  remains  true  that  the  critic  feels 
himself  to  some  extent,  and  somewhere,  criticised  by  his 
own  criticism.  It  is  only  in  the  ironical  mockery  of  a 
Socrates  or  in  the  denunciations  of  a  Christ  that  the 
separative  judgment  loses  the  quality  of  a  cry  of  pain. 
This  is  not  the  final  transformation  of  pugnacity.  We 
may  well  long  for  a  world  in  which  “  Judge  not”  were 
possible. 


II 

Christianity  reveals  no  solicitude  for  the  necessities 
of  the  social  order.  Its  precepts  are  explicit,  and  Tols- 

i  No  account  of  the  philosophy  of  change  is  complete  which  refers 
it  alone  to  the  elan  vital  with  its  perpetual  creativity,  nor  yet  to  the 
Unmoved  Mover  that  beckons  all  men  to  its  absolute  good.  To  these 
must  be  added  the  driving  power  of  the  standards  and  systems  which 
are  due  to  the  action  of  human  analysis  and  concept-making;  and  which 
by  ceaselessly  reminding  man  of  what  he  is  not,  through  criticism, 
exclusion,  and  negation,  spur  him  in  infinite  sequence  toward  their  own 
goals. 


CHRISTIANITY  AND  PUGNACITY  373 

toy  understood  them :  resist  not  evil,  love  your  enemy, 
judge  not,  recompense  evil  with  good.  These  precepts 
define  not  so  much  a  transformation  of  pugnacity  as  an 
abolition  of  it,  together  with  the  whole  process  of  social 
measurement  and  of  justice  itself.  And  so  far  as  these 
commands  are  provided  with  a  commentary,  they  seem 
not  alone  to  admit  but  to  assert  an  abandonment  of 
justice.  For  the  commentary  explains  that  these  princi¬ 
ples  are  one  aspect  of  the  perfection  of  “your  Father 
which  is  in  heaven/ ’  which  perfection  we  are  sum¬ 
moned  to  make  our  own:  and  this  perfection  on  God’s 
part  is  manifest  in  this,  that  “He  maketh  his  sun  to  rise 
on  the  evil  and  the  good,  and  sendeth  rain  on  the  just 
and  on  the  unjust.  ’  ’  In  other  words,  that  which  to  some 
minds  appears  as  the  total  moral  indifference  of  me¬ 
chanical  nature  is  here  held  up  as  the  perfection  of  God. 
What  is  this  but  to  make  the  absence  of  justice,  the 
indiscriminate  treatment  of  good  and  evil,  the  supreme 
law  of  the  spiritual  world? 

To  argue  thus  is  to  forget  that  what  is  mechanical 
behavior  in  the  inorganic  realm  is  no  longer  mechani¬ 
cal  in  the  realm  of  stimulus  and  response.  The  ocean 
responds  neither  to  the  blandishments  nor  to  the 
threats  of  Xerxes;  but  the  mechanisms  of  his  own 
menials  would  react  to  the  one  by  smiles  and  to  the 
other  by  signs  of  terror.  So  the  response  of  amiable¬ 
ness  to  the  amiable  approach,  and  the  response  of  en¬ 
mity  to  the  inimical  approach,  while  it  has  the  sem¬ 
blance  of  justice,  and  the  sanction  of  the  aesthetic  sacred 
law,  is  the  type  of  a  moral  mechanism.  And  to  refuse 
to  respond  in  kind,  while  it  may  seem  to  return  to  the 


374 


CHKISTIANITY 


indifference  of  nature,  may  be  the  precise  opposite  of 
a  mechanical  attitude.  The  attacker  expects  your  re¬ 
sistance;  if  you  do  not  resist,  your  rejection  of  his 
challenge  may  enter  the  situation  with  the  force  of  a 
new  idea. 

Like  all  surprises,  the  absence  of  resistance  where 
resistance  was  expected,  would  necessarily  arouse  some 
new  idea  in  the  aggressor  by  way  of  reviewing  the  situa¬ 
tion  in  his  mind.  His  new  idea,  however,  might  be  one 
of  several:  he  might  conclude  that  you  were  too  dead 
to  fight,  or  that  you  were  too  much  alive  to  fight.  Chris¬ 
tianity  depends  on  the  possibility  of  putting  signifi¬ 
cance  into  the  latter  idea.  And  the  persistent  refusal 
to  criticise  or  to  retaliate  can  be  a  sign  of  more  life, 
rather  than  less,  only  when  it  is  a  response  to  a  greater 
degree  of  truth.  It  must  mean  that  the  self  which  has 
defects  or  which  does  injury  is  seen  to  be  other  than 
the  real  self;  and  the  non-resistance  constitutes  an 
appeal  from  the  apparent  self  to  the  real  self,  or  from 
the  actual  self  to  the  self  that  may  be.  In  this  case,  it 
is  not  injustice,  but  it  is  justice  to  the  living  and  change¬ 
able.  It  is  a  type  of  justice  undiscovered  by  the  Greek, 
for  it  is  based  neither  on  equity  nor  on  proportionality 
to  any  self  that  exists.  Greek  justice,  distributive  or 
retributive,  took  men  statically,  as  they  presented  them¬ 
selves.  This  type  of  justice  refuses  to  take  a  man  at 
his  own  estimate  of  himself ;  it  insists  on  the  self  of  a 
more  nearly  absolute  estimate,  the  self  that  must  be , 
and  which  this  resolve  of  the  non-resisting  will  will 
help  to  bring  into  being.  It  is  a  justice  done  for  the  first 
time  to  the  plasticity  and  responsiveness  of  human  na- 


CHKISTIANITY  AND  PUGNACITY  375 

ture  toward  our  own  wills :  it  is  an  absolute,  or  creative, 
justice. 

And  this  is  the  only  type  of  response  that  can  finally 
satisfy  pugnacity  itself.  For  what  pugnacity  wants  is 
not  simply  the  destruction  of  evil :  it  wants  the  evil  will 
to  hate  and  destroy  its  own  evil.  The  element  of  hate 
in  fighting  and  punishment  and  criticism  is  directed 
toward  making  the  guilty  consciousness  consume  its 
own  iniquity ;  and  to  this  end  the  instinctive  ferocity  of 
gesture  and  grimace  make  for  forcing  the  evil-doer  by 
suggestion  into  a  momentary  abhorrence  and  fear  of  his 
own  crime.  But  the  evil  will  will  not  hate  itself,  unless 
it  first  becomes  the  good  will:  hence  pugnacity  is  not 
satisfied  unless  the  replacement  of  the  evil  by  the  good 
takes  place.  And  when  it  takes  place,  that  which  was 
to  be  hated  has  disappeared.  Hence,  what  pugnacity 
wants  is  to  make  the  man  over:  it  wants  to  create  the 
conditions  for  the  free  self-rejection  of  the  evil.  And  for 
this  act  of  creation,  the  absolute  justice  of  1  ‘  Love  your 
enemies’ ’  is  a  necessary  demand. 

Ill 

Christianity  intends  to  impose  upon  pugnacity  the 
interpretation  of  a  creative  impulse.  This  is  its  final 
transformation.  And  if  we  have  rightly  discerned  the 
meaning  of  these  precepts,  we  are  in  a  position  to  judge 
whether  they  intend  to  do  away  at  once  with  social 
criticism,  or  social  justice,  or  war.  Let  me  mention 
two  or  three  principles  which  will  govern  our  decision 
on  these  questions. 

1.  The  forgiving,  or  non-resisting,  or  enemy-loving 


376 


CHRISTIANITY 


attitude  has  its  entire  justification  in  the  ‘new  idea’ 
which  it  conveys  to  the  wrong-doer.  It  is  a  language: 
and  the  whole  virtue  of  a  language  is  that  it  is  under¬ 
stood.  The  attitude  itself,  we  saw,  was  outwardly  in¬ 
distinguishable  from  apathy  or  indifference:  it  must 
by  all  means  distinguish  itself  from  apathy  or  indif¬ 
ference,  or  it  is  a  failure.  He  who  so  uses  non-resistance 
that  it  is  mistakable  for  passivity,  weakness,  cowardice, 
or  folly,  uses  it  unworthily;  and  shows  thereby  that 
he  knows  not  what  it  means. 

Letting  myself  be  cheated  or  abused  through  lethargy 
or  lack  of  time  or  courage  to  make  an  issue  cannot  be 
claimed  as  an  exhibition  of  divine  perfection.  Unless  I 
am,  in  fact,  so  much  of  a  seer  as  to  be  a  lover  of  my 
enemy,  it  is  both  futile  and  false  to  assume  the  behavior 
of  love:  we  can  generally  rely  on  the  enemy  to  give 
such  conduct  its  true  name.  And  love  of  this  sort  is 
seldom  possible  in  the  more  transitory  and  impersonal 
relations  of  life :  it  is  in  the  quieter  contacts  of  man  with 
man  that  this  creative  language  has  its  best  chance  of 
being  heard.  In  the  dealings  of  a  composite  national 
mind  with  another  composite  national  mind,  I  believe 
that  there  is  a  possibility  of  using  the  language  of  crea¬ 
tive  good-will :  but  the  conditions  are  harder  to  realize, 
and  the  penalties  for  an  enforcement  of  falsely  affec¬ 
tionate  conduct  deservedly  severe. 

2.  Not  only  must  the  user  of  this  language  consider 
whether  he  can  use  it  honestly;  he  must  consider  also 
whether  he  has  a  listener.  It  is  sometimes  necessary 
to  induce  a  quiescent  frame  of  mind  in  the  other  before 
any  language  can  ‘get  across.’  There  is  such  a  thing 


CHRISTIANITY  AND  PUGNACITY  377 

in  the  world  as  persistent  and  self-assured  cynicism; 
and  there  is  such  a  thing  as  determined  bad-will.  It 
is  chiefly  these  which  make  wars  necessary.  War  is  not 
to  be  understood  as  necessarily  a  negation  of  the  prin¬ 
ciple  of  Christianity ;  a  just  war  is  an  attempt  to  create 
the  conditions  under  which  the  opponent  is  disposed  to 
listen  to  the  language  of  the  still,  small  voice. 

3.  The  creative  attitude  is  not  meant  to  displace  but 
to  subordinate  the  critical  attitude,  and  its  varieties, 
the  competitive,  the  punitive,  the  warlike  attitudes. 

Antagonism  is  not  an  intrinsic  evil ;  it  is  an  evil  only 
when  it  is  not  included  within  a  fundamental  agree¬ 
ment.  If  it  is  understood  that  the  contestants  have 
shaken  hands,  they  may  attack  each  other  with  entire 
good-will.  What  would  become  of  the  game  of  chess 
under  the  rule,  “If  any  one  would  take  away  your 
castle,  give  him  your  queen  also”?  If  an  abstractly 
devised  era  of  good-feeling  destroys  the  era  of  good 
chess,  or  of  any  more  serious  competition  wherein  men 
are  fairly  tested,  it  will  not  long  remain  an  era  of  good 
feeling.  Politeness  may  be  regarded  as  an  artful  as¬ 
sumption  of  universal  benevolence  for  the  purpose  of  a 
restricted  social  undertaking:  it  does  not  rule  out  all 
contests,  but  it  rules  out  those  that  would  disturb  the 
predominantly  aesthetic  character  of  the  limited  oc¬ 
casion.  Just  in  so  far  as  politeness  oversteps  its  sphere, 
it  becomes  the  covering  of  the  bitterest  hostility,  that 
which  fences  from  beneath  the  cloak  of  formal  friendli¬ 
ness.  Amenity  without  opposition  becomes  empty :  even 
lovers  weary  of  it.  The  force  of  the  rule  of  love  in  com¬ 
mon  social  interchange  is  directed,  not  to  eliminating 


378 


CHRISTIANITY 


the  critical  judgment,  but  rather  to  making  firm  that 
prior  understanding  according  to  which  we  unite  in 
the  will  to  stand  or  fall  by  the  rules  of  the  proposed 
contest. 

Thus,  the  world  must  have  both  systems.  Contest  is 
a  peril  to  the  soul ;  criticism  cannot  exist  without  some 
self-condemnation:  but  the  salvage  of  human  nature 
lies  not  in  abandoning  them,  but  in  giving  them  the  true 
setting.  Eeligion  has  the  office  of  referring  men  to  the 
absolute;  not  the  absolute  which  removes  them  from 
the  relative,  but  the  absolute  which  by  establishing  a 
point  of  rest  within  the  flux  of  change,  gives  all  change, 
with  its  effort  and  its  hostilities,  its  total  meaning. 

For  this  reason  I  cannot  agree  with  those  interpret¬ 
ers  of  Christianity  who  say  that  Christianity  sets  up 
an  ideal  for  an  ideal  state  of  society,  not  for  the  present. 
Christianity  is  never  more  clearly  a  rule  for  immediate 
adoption  than  in  its  dealing  with  pugnacity.  It  ex¬ 
presses  the  final  satisfaction  of  the  will  of  the  fighter  in 
the  midst  of  every  good  fight. 


CHAPTER  XLII 


CHRISTIANITY  AND  SEX-LOVE 


NOT  a  few  lovers  of  peace  are  now  reminding  us 
of  the  doctrine  of  non-resistance  in  Christianity, 
urging  us  in  its  name  to  forget  the  arts  of  war.  It 
hardly  occurs  to  these  persons  to  carry  the  same  logic 
into  the  region  of  sex-morality.  The  more  consistent 
abstractionists,  like  Tolstoy,  perceived  that  the  letter 
of  the  new  law  is  not  less  hostile  to  the  family  and  to 
the  State  than  to  the  use  of  force.  If  pacifism  quotes 
Christianity,  it  may  well  learn  from  Tolstoy  either  to 
renounce  sex-love  together  with  physical  resistance,  or 
to  find  a  place  for  both. 

On  the  meaning  and  destiny  of  sex-love  Christianity 
has  little  to  say.  But  if  we  read  together  with  the 
documents  the  tendencies  that  worked  themselves  out 
in  the  early  communities,  there  can  be  no  question  of 
its  preference  for  virginity.  The  monastic  ideal  is 
implicit  in  its  standards.  The  sword  which  it  brought 
was  to  divide  between  a  man  and  his  family  as  well 
as  his  possessions:  “Leave  all”  for  the  sake  of  the 
new  kingdom, — this  injunction  was  meant  and  taken 
in  deadly  earnest,  and  without  this  intense  singleness 
of  purpose  early  Christianity  would  not  have  done  its 
work  in  the  world.  It  would  not  be  untrue  to  the  sense 
of  Christianity  to  set  up  beside  the  “Judge  not,”  i.e., 
Know  not  enmity  or  defect,  a  corresponding  precept, 


380 


CHRISTIANITY 


“Know  not  sex,”  i.e.,  Begard  all  persons  as  persons, 
and  never  as  men  or  women. 

We  cannot  say  in  advance  that  it  is  impossible  to 
comply  with  snch  a  precept.  The  life  of  sex,  in  the 

social  order,  is  hardlv  as  inevitable  for  the  individual 

7  •/ 

as  is  pugnacity:  there  are  those,  and  their  number 
increases,  who  seem  to  make  out  a  complete  life  without 
it.  It  is  true  that  the  psychological  function  of  the 
family  must  somehow  be  performed  if  men  and  women 
are  to  retain  their  normal  balance.  But  it  is  not  at  all 
obvious  that  this  function  must  be  performed  by  sex- 
love  itself;  for  while  sex  is  the  deepest  of  the  hungers, 
it  is  also  the  most  versatile  in  its  capacity  for  substi¬ 
tution  or  sublimation.  The  Freudians  are  doubtless 
right  in  saying  that  such  a  need  cannot  safely  be  re¬ 
pressed.  But  we  want  to  know  what  it  is  that  may  not 
be  repressed.  We  would  do  well  to  enquire  more  care¬ 
fully  what  sex-love  in  its  own  natural  self -teaching,  or 
dialectic,  means. 


I 

It  would  seem  the  first  point  of  wisdom  in  dealing 
with  this  question  to  be  clear  that  the  need  which  we 
call  sex-love  has  a  meaning,  like  every  other  instinct; 
and  that  to  find  this  meaning  requires  an  effort  of 
interpretation.  The  use  of  the  word  ‘  instinct  ’  here  is 
likely  to  carry  with  it  the  greatest  volume  of  sophistry ; 
for  it  is  so  easy  to  assume  and  so  far  from  the  truth 
that  we  know  off-hand  what  an  instinct  wants.  It  is 
impossible  to  read  the  psychological  meaning  of  any 
instinct  in  its  biological  context,  and  more  particularly 


CHBISTIANITY  AND  SEX-LOVE 


381 


the  instinct  of  sex.  The  biological  meaning  is  more 
likely  to  be  found  from  the  psychological  end. 

What  the  psychological  function  of  sex-love  is  we 
have  already  vaguely  outlined  in  describing  it  as  the 
passion  of  the  private  order,  corresponding  to  ambi¬ 
tion  in  the  public  order.  It  is  the  life  of  the  residual 
self,  unexpressed  in  the  public  order.  The  sexes  are 
fitted  to  recognize  more  of  the  subconscious  and  grow¬ 
ing  in  one  another  than  can  ordinarily  be  appreciated 
between  members  of  the  same  sex ;  they  are  drawn  into 
a  protective  attitude  toward  whatever  is  groping  and 
i  unsaved ’  in  the  other  self.  An  extension  of  ‘  sym¬ 
pathy,’  love  appears  as  a  premonition  of  a  power  to 
confer  and  to  receive  life  at  a  profounder  level  than 
that  of  words  and  services.  Thus  the  craving  of  sex 
on  its  psychological  side  might  he  roughly  described 
as  a  craving  for  subconscious  respiration. 

In  this  respiration,  the  quest  of  power,  visible  as  an 
impulse  toward  bringing  the  ineffective  self  into  effect, 
is  paradoxically  mingled  with  an  impulse  toward  com¬ 
plete  self-abandonment.  Passion  always  means  the 
reference  of  the  whole  of  life  to  a  new  focus,  and  hence 
a  thoroughgoing  abandonment  of  rival  foci ;  but  in  the 
case  of  love,  the  distinctive  joy  of  abandonment  is  pre¬ 
pared  by  a  recurrent  need  which  no  one  escapes.  I 
mean  the  need  to  denounce  from  time  to  time  the  ex¬ 
pression  one  finds,  not  alone  in  public  service,  but 
in  all  social  activity  and  in  the  language  of  all  conven¬ 
tions  and  of  all  intellectual  concepts, — to  denounce 
these  not  as  false  but  as  inadequate,  and  to  break 
through  into  a  region  of  expression  which  is  imme- 


382 


CHRISTIANITY 


diate  and  entire,  and  yet  a  language,  a  communion  with 
another  self.  Such  a  subordination  of  the  relatively 
futile  to  a  relatively  adequate  language,  the  life  of 
sex  with  its  symbols  seems  to  promise.  Intimacy  and 
the  symbols  of  intimacy,  the  throwing  together  of  all 
concrete  fortunes, — the  fortunes  of  thought,  of  the 
plans,  labors,  and  economies  of  life,  and  of  the  physi¬ 
cal  being  also, — radicalism  of  this  sort  offers  a  pros¬ 
pect  of  complete  release  for  that  deeper  will  which 
is  forever  brooding  over  its  visible  career  and  finding 
it  vanity  and  vexation  of  spirit, — as  taken  alone,  it  is. 

This  prospective  release  of  the  deeper  strata  of 
personality  in  the  lover  is  due  to  a  discovery — the 
‘stimulus’  of  his  love — an  item  of  knowledge,  if  you 
will;  for,  like  all  instinct,  love  has  at  its  core  a  char¬ 
acteristic  perception  or  intuition.  This  knowledge  is, 
in  the  first  place,  simply  his  own  newly  awakened 
perception,  his  ‘sympathetic  intelligence’  of  what  the 
beloved  being,  apart  from  all  acquired  excellences,  is. 
This  knowledge  is  presumably  not  scientifically  new, 
except  in  so  far  as  it  is  a  knowledge  of  that  unique 
individual.  What  makes  the  experience  one  of  love  is 
that  this  unique  acquisition  of  the  gift  of  sight  with 
reference  to  that  unique  person  is  simply  the  lover’s 
initiation  into  an  old  and  well-known  mystery.  What 
is  it,  then,  that  he  sees  ? 

The  answer,  so  far  as  it  is  general,  may  be  found 
in  asking  what,  after  all,  that  being,  or  any  other  con¬ 
scious  being,  is.  And  what  is  such  a  being  if  not  a 
process  of  thoughtful  and  active  intercourse  with  its 
own  environment?  To  perceive  such  a  being  would 


CHRISTIANITY  AND  SEX-LOVE 


383 


be  to  perceive  a  process  of  dealing  with  the  world,  and 
thus  to  see  the  world  through  that  being.  What  love 
sees  does  not  stop  short  of  the  realities:  its  horizon, 
its  stimulus,  is  metaphysical.  The  truth  seems  to  be 
that  the  minds  of  men  and  women  are  so  made  that 
each,  by  the  aid  of  the  other,  may  see  farther  into  the 
universe  than  either  can  see  by  itself  or  by  the  aid  of 
others  of  its  own  kind.  And  what  one  seems  to  see  in 
the  other  is  largely  seen  through  the  other :  what  ap¬ 
pears  to  be  a  quality  of  the  individual  turns  out  to  be 
a  quality  of  the  world.  This  is  not  to  deny  these 
qualities  of  the  individual,  however;  for  the  beauty 
and  worth  of  a  person  are  not  separable  from  the  world 
of  objects  into  which  that  person  habitually  looks. 

But  whatever  the  content  of  this  half-personal,  half¬ 
metaphysical  vision,  the  first  impulse  and  meaning  of 
love,  like  that  of  art  in  response  to  the  beautiful,  is  to 
possess  what  it  has  seen  by  reproducing  it.  It  under¬ 
takes  to  edit,  portray,  proclaim,  give  out  in  some  way 
its  discovery,  and  preferably  to  a  worthy  rather  than 
to  an  unworthy  audience,  hence  (with  the  character¬ 
istic  inward-turning  of  love)  commonly  to  the  beloved 
person  himself.  Thus  the  will  to  power  seems  reduced 
and  tamed  to  the  idle  form  of  praise,  and  spends  the 
energy  that  might  have  moved  the  world  in  adorn¬ 
ment,  idealization,  and  numerous  busy  offices  called 
into  being  not  for  their  utility,  but  solely  for  the  ele¬ 
ment  of  praise  which  they  embody.  But  praise,  it  may 
be  noted,  under  the  guise  of  service,  is  still  a  subtle 
taking-possession,  an  assertion  of  comprehension  and 
right.  And  all  taking-possession  in  the  progress  of 


384 


CHRISTIANITY 


love  may  (with  allowance  for  feeble  terms  where  all 
terms  are  feeble)  be  described  as  a  development  of 
praise:  with  increasingly  intimate  care  and  service 
there  is  consistent  enlargement  of  that  assumed  right 
until  it  ventures  to  include  in  its  scope  the  entire  gamut 
of  the  being  of  the  beloved,  from  thought  to  immediate 
existence,  and  to  render  back  this  entire  gamut  as 
something  known,  comprehended,  praised, — and  yet 
with  the  imprint  upon  it  of  that  once  alien  will,  the 
consciousness  of  the  lover  and  knower. 

Especially  in  dealing  with  the  meaning  of  love,  the 
notion  of  ‘  power ’  threatens  to  become  inept.  For  it 
is  precisely  in  love  that  the  whole  conscious  interest  in 
power  seems  neutralized  and  rendered  latent  by  the 
dominant  interest  in  mutuality,  in  getting  rid  of  all 
distance  and  otherness.  No  doubt  the  lover  comes  into 
a  kind  of  incidental  power  or  confidence  toward  the 
world  at  large — if  he  is  accepted ;  he  may  even  be  said 
to  taste  greatness :  but  the  greatness  is  conferred  upon 
him,  the  power  is  borrowed  rather  than  his  own.  Be¬ 
tween  the  lovers,  also,  there  is  a  wholly  mutual  sense 
of  dignity  which  comes  from  the  awareness  of  validity : 
with  their  other  metaphysical  knowledge,  the  lovers 
also  know  that  between  them — not  in  either  of  them — 
the  tribe  is  present;  the  promise  and  potency  of 
humanity  as  a  self -continuing  stream  of  conscious  life 
is,  if  not  in  their  keeping,  still  within  reach  of  their 
conjuring.  But  what  thus  seems  their  power  is  not 
their  own :  it  is  the  power  of  nature  and  of  society. 

But  I  would  still  say  that  just  because  of  this  vica¬ 
riousness  and  latency,  the  will  to  power  here  notably 


CHRISTIANITY  AND  SEX-LOVE 


385 


comes  to  its  own.  For  power  is  realized  not  primarily 
in  self-assertive  exertion,  but  rather  in  taking  advan¬ 
tage  of  the  hierarchical  arrangement  of  the  powers  of 
the  world,  affecting  large  issues  by  touching  their 
springs.  The  technique  and  strategy  of  love  is  just 
this,  that  it  works  back,  so  to  speak,  toward  the  focus 
of  the  world’s  forces,  the  tilting  point  of  the  avalanche. 
It  touches  the  curve  of  life  at  the  moment  of  its  bend¬ 
ing  from  the  rise  to  the  decline,  where  but  an  increment 
of  strength  suffices  to  work  the  miracle  and  hold  life 
away  from  the  gravitation  of  mortality.  Thus,  instinc¬ 
tively,  love  finds  itself  assuming  for  a  brief  moment 
the  actual  work  of  a  god:  it  undertakes,  while  acting 
as  a  channel  for  universal  life,  to  be  an  original  maker 
of  life. 


II 

These  undertakings,  I  say,  are  incipient  in  the  first 
impulse  of  love.  But  in  carrying  out  its  primary  ambi¬ 
tions,  love  finds  subjective  satisfactions  and  pleasures, 
and  on  account  of  these,  love,  as  a  matter  of  racial 
and  typical  if  not  of  universal  experience,  suffers  a 
fall.  The  fall  is  that  it  adopts  as  an  end  the  subjective 
joy  that  it  has  discovered.  It  limits  its  horizon;  and 
mingling  an  overweight  of  sense  in  its  meaning,  it  be¬ 
comes  selfish.  It  draws  circles,  creates  an  imaginary 
world  of  two,  and  thinks  that  all  the  sufficiencies  of  the 
universe  are  contained  within  it.  No  love  begins  by 
seeing  in  love  primarily  a  natural  desire;  but  some 
loves  end  that  way,  and  most  at  some  time  or  other 
tend  to. 


386 


CHRISTIANITY 


What  forces  love  out  of  this  circle  as  a  rule  is  not 
abstract  idealism  but  simply  the  experience  of  self¬ 
defeat,  i.e.,  the  natural  dialectic.  It  finds  that  it  cannot 
retain  even  its  own  narrow  type  of  satisfaction,  because 
it  has  mistaken  its  meaning.  It  is  forced  to  break  out 
of  that  circle  for  the  very  breath  of  life  it  sought  there. 
This  is  a  critical  juncture  in  the  adventure  of  love. 
For  while  love  now  knows  beyond  peradventure  that 
it  has  been  disappointed,  it  may  not  see  clearly  where 
the  repair  of  its  fortunes  lies.  One  of  the  most  inviting 
of  hypotheses  is  that  it  has  chosen  the  wrong  individual 
as  an  object  of  devotion.  What  it  thought  it  saw  in  that 
person  is  clearly  not  there.  It  may  accordingly  betake 
itself  to  wandering,  as  a  cure  for  its  confinement  in 
what  is  subjective  and  poor  of  meaning.  Fickleness  is 
right  and  ‘  natural  ’  in  all  that  it  denies, — it  denies  that 
that  was  satisfying.  But  fickleness  is  more  than  likely 
to  be  false  in  what  it  affirms.  It  has  a  negatively  prag¬ 
matic  value  in  the  course  of  the  dialectic  of  experience : 
that  which  does  not  work,  is  not  the  real  thing. 

Ill 

It  is  at  this  point  that  social  pressure  comes  to  the 
rescue.  The  office  of  social  pressure  is  to  force  dis¬ 
illusioned  love  into  another  inference  than  that  of 
natural  wandering.  Its  satisfaction  was  lost,  not  be¬ 
cause  its  first  vision  was  deceptive,  but  because  it  has 
by  its  own  self-will  obscured  that  first  vision.  What 
it  first  saw  was  an  independent  soul;  and  that  soul 
has  now  been  reduced  to  dependence  upon  itself.  What 
one  has  wearied  of  is  the  limited  and  clinging  lover, 


CHRISTIANITY  AND  SEX-LOVE 


387 


having  no  independent  grasp  on  absolute  reality  and 
value,  and  therefore  opaque  to  what  was  once  visible 
through  him.  To  that  first  spirit  it  could  minister  with 
pleasure,  or  rather,  by  necessity ;  to  the  present  being 
it  can  bring  only  requests  for  its  own  satisfaction.  It 
is  not  that  the  person  has  changed,  but  that  the  horizon, 
from  which  all  personal  worth  is  derived,  has  shrunk. 
The  only  being  you  can  love  is  the  being  who  has  an 
independent  object  of  worship,  and  that  holds  you  out 
of  your  self-indulgence  to  a  worship  of  that  same 
object.  The  health  and  meaning  of  love  depend  on  that 
common  devotion  to  a  common  divinity.  Now  society 
insists  on  a  part  of  this  horizon;  it  reminds  marriage 
of  its  responsibility  to  the  public  order;  it  takes  hos¬ 
tages  against  too  easy  wandering,  providing  that  any 
retreat  shall  be  as  public  and  as  well  considered  as 
the  original  commitment.  It  thus  compels  a  fickle  im¬ 
pulse  at  least  to  re-examine  its  theory  of  the  case,  and 
so  provides  for  a  time  the  external  form  of  loyalty, 
in  the  good  hope  that  the  pair  will  supply  the  substance 
thereof  from  their  own  living  resources.  But  of  itself, 
society  cannot  provide  this  substance,  and  its  pressure 
in  favor  of  its  conventional  family  life,  helpful  to  great 
majorities  in  the  quest  of  their  own  individual  mean¬ 
ings,  leaves  the  few  without  a  guide  and  empty,  mere 
rebellious  conformists,  or  non-conformists.  Society 
cannot  revive  a  dead  or  comatose  affection;  it  cannot 
so  much  as  explain  to  the  arid  ex-lover  what  it  is  that 
he  wants. 

Such  explanation  is  the  work  of  the  philosopher ;  and 
Plato  came  nearer  to  fulfilling  this  office  than  most 


388 


CHRISTIANITY 


other  thinkers  of  ancient  or  modern  times.  All  love, 
said  he,  as  it  becomes  aware  of  its  meaning,  is  a  de¬ 
mand  for  immortality  through  c  ‘  creation  in  the  medium 
of  beauty.”  Ignorant  love  forgets  that  its  horizon  is 
immortality :  enlightened  love  realizes  that  its  meaning 
is  only  completely  found  when  personal  and  family 
relations  are  left  behind ;  it  is  found  in  that  metaphysi¬ 
cal  element  which  all  love  more  or  less  dimly  reveals, 
in  the  quest  and  transmission  by  teaching  of  the  knowl¬ 
edge  of  what  is  absolutely  real.  It  is  in  the  giving  of 
that  second  birth  of  which  the  Brahmans  taught,  rather 
than  in  the  giving  of  the  first  birth,  that  the  full  satis¬ 
faction  of  love  is  to  be  found.  Thus  sex-love,  completely 
understood,  has  no  psychological  need  of  physical  re¬ 
lationship  nor  of  marriage;  and  Plato  seems  to  speak 
in  total  accord  with  the  voice  of  early  Christianity. 

But  there  are  few  to-day  who  accept  the  interpre¬ 
tation  of  Plato  as  complete.  Nor  does  it  seem  to  me 
complete,  nor  equivalent  to  the  purport  of  Christianity. 

IV 

To  reach  a  completer  view  of  the  meaning  of  love, 
I  must  recall  that  in  that  stage  of  the  dialectic  which 
we  described  as  the  ‘fall  of  love/  there  is  a  gain  as 
well  as  a  loss  of  meaning.  And  the  element  of  meaning 
here  gained  is  not  included  in  Plato’s  interpretation. 

For  when,  by  self-indulgence,  the  circle  of  love 
narrows,  the  beloved  is  at  times  within  the  circle,  a 
fellow  conspirator  in  the  limitation ;  and  at  times  out¬ 
side  the  circle.  And  when  the  eye  tempered  by  self- 
interest  sees  the  other  in  this  external  fashion,  it  sees 


CHRISTIANITY  AND  SEX-LOVE 


389 


him  impersonally  and  critically.  His  defects  are  visible, 
not  at  all  for  the  first  time  (for  love  is  not  blind,  it  is 
merely  confident),  but  in  the  new  light  of  a  problem, — 
a  problem  which  the  private  order  must  share  with  the 
public  order.  These  defects  are  likely  to  become  the 
object  of  a  suffering  criticism,  the  type  of  criticism 
which  condemns  the  critic,  but  which,  none  the  less,  has 
its  own  measure  of  truth.  In  brief,  the  evolution  of  love 
begins  to  include  within  itself,  more  or  less  unavowedly, 
a  segment  of  the  development  of  pugnacity.  And  pug¬ 
nacity  always  deals  with  the  concrete;  it  is  a  highly 
contemporaneous  and  individualizing  impulse.  It  does 
not  permit  the  growth  of  love  to  take  a  Platonic  direc¬ 
tion  from  the  more  material  to  the  more  ethereal 
objects  of  contemplation.  It  reminds  it  of  its  highly 
particular  historic  task.  Whatever  its  meaning,  it  must 
include  all  that  a  completely  transformed  pugnacity 
means :  it  must  learn  the  art  of  recovering  in  the  other 
the  absolute  self  disposed  to  reject  its  own  imper¬ 
fection. 

Love  is  the  best  agent  for  the  instruction  of  pug¬ 
nacity;  but  pugnacity,  in  turn,  is  (in  some  form  or 
other)  a  very  fit  agent  for  the  instruction  of  a  flagging 
love.  What  it  has  to  teach  is  no  more  than  what  love 
all  along  knew,  namely,  its  own  interest  in  the  removal 
of  defects  from  the  beloved,  its  uncompromising 
jealousy  of  all  such  defects,  its  wholly  sufficient  power 
to  overcome  them.  This  is  love’s  responsibility;  but 
let  me  say  that  in  the  integrity  of  the  natural  impulse 
of  love,  it  is  an  ingredient  of  love ’s  enthusiasm.  Love 
does  not  want  a  perfect  object:  it  wants  an  object  to 


390 


CHRISTIANITY 


be  made  over,  fit  for  its  own  power  of  re-creation. 
The  meaning  of  the  great  passion  is  not  found  pri¬ 
marily  in  bringing  forth  a  race  of  new  beings  who 
shall  realize  in  time  all  that  was  lacking  to  their  pro¬ 
genitors.  Its  meaning,  like  that  of  religion  itself,  is  a 
claim  upon  present  experience.  It  means  nothing  less 
than  the  destruction  of  what  is  recognized  as  mortal 
— I  do  not  say  in  the  other,  but  in  both,  and  in  their 
mutual  life — and  its  re-creation  in  the  light  of  what¬ 
ever  beauty  it  has  seen.  But  its  impulse  to  destroy 
that  mortality  and  to  reproduce  that  beauty  is  no 
more  one  of  abstract  immortalization  than  is  the  work 
of  an  artist:  it  is  a  very  concrete  and  present  aim. 
More  than  this,  such  a  transformation  is  what  love 
actually,  though  subconsciously,  and  more  or  less  per¬ 
manently,  achieves. 

Thus  the  dialectic  of  love  reaches  an  interpretation 
more  active  than  Platonic  and  more  absorbing  of  the 
entire  soul-and-body  entity.  Love  is  that  region  of  life 
which  exists  in  giving  life;  and  this  means  develop¬ 
ing  the  possibilities  of  a  mutual  existence  both  of  sense 
and  of  idea.  It  is  satisfied  only  when  its  power  can 
work  in  a  completely  historic  form.  It  ministers  to 
the  soul,  but  always  by  way  of  body  and  estate.  Its 
first  impulsive  certainty  of  power  it  must  replace  by 
a  more  conscious  and  responsible  certainty.  But  if  the 
interest  in  life-giving  sinks  into  tolerance  and  habitual 
modus  vivendi,  love  is  hibernating  or  dead.  It  is  better 
that  it  should  remain  consciously  critical.  For  love  is 
by  necessity  aggressive  and  originative. 


CHRISTIANITY  AND  SEX-LOVE 


391 


V 

Christianity  sets  itself  at  the  goal  of  this  dialectical 
development,  careless  as  always  of  the  relations  of  the 
goal  to  the  nsnal  social  process.  It  sets  an  absolute 
standard  for  the  relations  of  men  and  women;  but  it 
hardly  suggests  that  this  standard  is  to  be  reached 
through  any  such  course  of  experience  as  we  have 
depicted,  still  less  through  the  ascent  of  the  Platonic 
ladder.  Its  teaching  may  be  stated  somewhat  as  follows : 

1.  By  assuming,  as  Christianity  does,  the  non-neces¬ 
sity  of  marriage  for  complete  satisfaction  of  the  will, 
it  teaches  by  implication  that  love  is  capable  of  com¬ 
plete  ‘  sublimation.  ’  But  it  is  noteworthy  that  in  the 
typical  transformation  of  love  adopted  by  Christianity, 
the  element  of  physical  ‘  ministration  ’  is  never  lost. 
It  is  through  the  washing  of  feet,  the  tendance  of  the 
injured,  the  breaking  of  the  box  of  ointment  (not  in 
any  sense  a  useful  social  service),  the  cup  of  cold  water, 
that  the  repressed  wish  finds  an  outlet.  As  a  matter 
of  history,  the  notable  trend  of  Christian  energies  into 
philanthropic  efforts  during  the  first  few  centuries  is 
the  manifestation  of  a  humanitarian  passion  sufficiently 
profound  to  drain  the  entire  life  of  affection  into  its 
channel;  and  philanthropy  is  not  Platonism. 

But  it  is  likewise  characteristic  of  Christianity  that 
the  personal  ministration  was  never  allowed  to  shrink 
to  the  level  of  purely  objective  and  useful  service. 
The  cup  of  cold  water  is  given  ‘in  the  name’  of  some¬ 
thing  believed  to  be  of  cosmic  importance  and  impera¬ 
tive  upon  the  completer  will  of  the  person  served.  The 
situation  is  given  its  own  horizon  of  meaning,  unob- 


392 


CHRISTIANITY 


trusively  in  the  main,  by  a  sign,  by  the  wearing  of  a 
uniform,  or  by  nothing  visible  at  all ;  but  the  purpose 
is  never  relinquished  of  remaking  the  mind  while  re¬ 
making  the  body.  Love,  to  Christianity  as  to  Plato, 
means  the  will  to  confer  immortality.  And  apart  from 
that  intent,  the  legacy  of  ‘  charity ’  imposed  upon  our 
present  social  order  begins  to  appear  as  a  wretched 
substitute  for  justice,  and  a  mockery  of  all  honest  love. 
The  justification,  and  the  only  justification,  of  charity 
is  its  metaphysical  import.  The  future  lies  rather  with 
the  useless  gift,  the  box  of  ointment,  i.e.,  with  the 
increasingly  adequate  sublimation  of  love  in  art,  the 
disinterested,  but  yet  physical,  tendance  of  the  im¬ 
mortal  in  man. 

Philanthropy  and  the  production  of  beauty,  both 
creative  activities,  are  the  two  chief  social  equivalents 
of  sex-love.  But  Christianity  proposes  them  as  com¬ 
plete  equivalents  only  when  they  are  elements  in  its 
own  form  of  the  religious  life.  This  form  is  one  which 
involves  a  concrete  union  of  4  ministry  9  with  worship, 
and  an  alternation  between  the  two.  In  the  usual  treat¬ 
ment  of  the  subject  by  psychologists  of  religion  it  is 
commonly  assumed  that  the  ministry  is  the  substantial, 
and  worship  the  insubstantial,  idle,  and  perhaps  harm¬ 
ful  element.  But  without  worship,  both  philanthropy 
and  art  merge  too  completely  with  the  public  order. 
Worship  is  the  recollection  of  the  spirit  and  the  renewal 
of  that  consciousness  of  meaning  which  is  to  be  carried 
into  the  administration.  It  is  an  effort  to  shake  off  the 
dust  and  illusion  of  a  partly  secularized  consciousness, 
and  to  recover  a  sense  (not  a  ‘ mere  idea’)  of  the  quality 


CHRISTIANITY  AND  SEX-LOVE 


393 


of  value,  of  beauty  perhaps,  in  the  ultimate  reality  of 
the  world.  It  has  no  other  object  than  that  same  meta¬ 
physical  truth  that  love  catches  glimpses  of — this 
objective  truth  is  the  primary  bond  of  identity  between 
them.  And  if  worship  attains  its  end,  it  is  the  realiza¬ 
tion  of  what  love  through  its  symbols  perpetually  seeks. 

Thus  we  confirm  the  existence  of  an  analogy  of  the 
life  of  religion  with  the  life  of  sex,  which  has  been  much 
dwelt  upon  of  late  as  though  it  were  a  new  discovery. 
But  what  it  means  is  a  very  ancient  insight ;  and  that 
insight  is  not  that  religion  is  nearly  identical  with  sex, 
but  that  sex,  as  it  finds  its  own  meaning,  approaches 
identity  with  religion.  The  same  is  obviously  true  of 
patriotism,  and  only  less  obviously  true  of  ambition 
and  of  every  other  positive  human  impulse;  but  the 
relationship  is  particularly  direct  in  the  case  of  sex- 
love,  first  because  of  its  occasionally  clear  and  con¬ 
fessed  metaphysical  horizon,  and  second  because  of 
the  natural  rhythm  or  alternation  in  its  life,  akin  to 
that  of  religion  just  pointed  out. 

A  right  understanding  of  this  truth  has  distinct 
social  importance  at  present,  when  marriage  as  a 
career  is  increasingly  a  matter  for  deliberate  choice 
or  rejection,  and  still  the  absence  of  marriage  is  felt 
as  a  loss  of  selfhood.  The  right  understanding  seems 
to  me  to  be  contained  in  this  simple  proposition:  that 
the  only  thing  about  a  human  will  that  needs  to  be 
satisfied  is  the  whole  will;  and  that  religion  is  the  satis¬ 
faction  of  the  whole  will,  the  will  to  power  in  its  in-^ 
elusive  form.  Apart  from  this  fact,  one  can  understand 
that  it  might  become  a  social  theorem  claiming  psycho- 


394 


CHRISTIANITY 


logical  support  that  no  substitution  for  the  life  of  sex 
is  possible,  and  that  the  social  evil  or  evils  are  neces¬ 
sarily  always  with  us.  With  this  fact,  the  consideration 
of  any  desirable  social  changes  is  at  once  freed  from 
the  false  and  intrusive  note  of  ‘necessity/  It  may  be 
remarked  in  passing  that  particularly  in  this  matter 
what  we  imagine  to  be  necessary  is  the  chief  agent  in 
creating  a  necessity;  and  conversely  a  presumption 
of  non-necessity,  supported  by  a  psychological  under¬ 
standing  of  the  principle  of  ‘  interpretation,  ’  may  well 
be  the  first  step  to  emancipation. 

2.  But  the  absolute  which  Christianity  prescribes 
in  this  field,  like  its  other  absolutes,  intends  to  live 
with  the  relative,  not  to  displace  it.  The  final  meaning 
of  sex-love  is  one  which  is  to  be  held  within  marriage, 
and  within  all  the  other  relations  of  men  and  women. 
There  are  a  few  religions  (think  of  the  religion  of 
Schopenhauer,  of  the  Shakers,  of  Tolstoy’s  later  days) 
that  have  attempted  to  exclude  the  life  of  sex;  but 
Christianity  is  not  among  them.  The  possibility  of 
sublimation  which  it  asserts  is  such  as  to  set  indi¬ 
viduals  free  to  choose  their  own  destiny,  celibate  or 
not,  as  otherwise  they  would  hardly  be  free.  It  is  cer¬ 
tainly  not  such  as  to  prescribe  either  type  of  destiny. 

In  the  relations  of  men  and  women,  what  Chris¬ 
tianity  explicitly  demands  is  not  defined  in  terms  of 
any  given  type  of  behavior ;  it  is  the  meaning  it  is  con¬ 
cerned  with.  It  is  a  question  of  how  one  “looketh  upon 
a  woman.”  And  the  sense  of  its  legislation  seems  to 
be  this:  that  any  behavior  is  right  behavior  which  is 
consistent  with  looking  upon  her  as  a  person  having 


CHKISTIANITY  AND  SEX-LOVE 


395 


a  destiny  of  her  own  to  work  ont,  a  possibility  of  im¬ 
mortality  which  depends  in  part  upon  your  own  atti¬ 
tude.  Any  behavior  is  right  which  is  consistent  with 
this:  no  social  constraint  need  deflect  the  conduct  of 
one  who  sees  always  as  far  as  the  “pilgrim  soul”  in 
the  person  of  his  neighbor.  But  an  attempt  to  bring 
this  meaning  into  the  relationship  will  quickly  exclude 
many  varieties  of  behavior.  There  is  more  room  for 
self-deception  here  than  in  most  other  regions  of  be¬ 
havior  in  declaring  freedom  from  particular  social 
rules  for  the  sake  of  an  alleged  general  meaning  or 
spirit.  But  the  meaning  proposed  by  Christianity 
supplies  a  test  with  a  cutting  edge  if  one  is  disposed 
to  use  it.  All  of  love  is  right  when  it  takes  for  its 
meaning  the  giving  of  life,  i.e.,  such  life  as  can  satisfy 
a  human  will. 


CHAPTER  XLIII 


CHRISTIANITY  AND  AMBITION 


EARLY  Christianity  had  no  overt  hostility  to  the 
regular  business  of  State  life.  It  paid  its  taxes 
and  its  debts,  observed  the  civil  laws,  baptized  centu¬ 
rions  and  magistrates  without  expecting  them  to  aban¬ 
don  their  callings,  and  on  occasion  appealed  to  Caesar. 
As  to  the  public  corvees ,  it  proposed  that  if  any  man, 
i.e.,  an  officer,  compel  you  to  go  with  him  one  mile,  the 
proper  spirit  would  pay  a  double  stint. 

■  Yet  it  would  be  vain  to  read  into  these  occasional 
signs  of  acquiescence  any  adoption  of  the  purposes 
of  the  public  order.  Whatever  are  the  ordinary  objects 
of  ambition, — precedence,  wealth,  office,  public  power, 
— they  are  relegated  with  an  almost  contemptuous  ges¬ 
ture  to  the  unimportant :  ‘  ‘  for  after  all  these  things  do 
the  Gentiles  seek.” 

A  new  ambition,  however,  enters  upon  the  heels  of 
the  old.  The  spiritual  life  of  the  universe  has  its  own 
structure,  its  own  focus,  and  as  it  were  its  own  court 
and  order  of  nobility.  And  for  him  who  would  be  first 
in  that  realm  there  is  a  maxim :  let  him  be  servant  of 
all.  Ambition  is  recognized,  and  in  the  same  breath 
annulled.  It  is  by  lighting  on  the  existing  paradoxes 
of  the  will  (not  by  inventing  them)  that  Christianity 
was  able  to  carry  the  art  of  life  beyond  the  Greek  level. 
Ambition  faced  with  this  reversal  of  its  natural  aim 


CHRISTIANITY  AND  AMBITION 


397 


is  compelled  to  undergo  a  metamorphosis  and  acquire 
a  more  stable  meaning. 

But  does  the  change  amount  to  anything  more  than 
translating  into  another  world  the  essential  aims  of 
the  present?  A  longer  aim  may  easily  reverse  a  present 
policy.  Treasures  are  to  be  laid  up,  as  usual,  but  in  a 
safer  place.  One  is  to  become  cosmically  intelligent 
and  therefore  cosmically  prudent.  A  motive  in  which 
one  detects  strands  of  instinctive  self-assertion  and 
instinctive  fear,  stirred  by  perceiving  the  perishable¬ 
ness  of  all  finite  goods,  is  to  lead  men  to  seek  in  an  im¬ 
perishable  good  the  absolute  security  of  the  soul.  I  am 
not  among  those  who  find  prudence  an  objectionable 
virtue ;  nor  who  reject  the  interest  in  personal  survival 
as  unseemly  in  a  mortal.  One  who  loves  life  at  all  is 
forever  becoming  more  deeply  involved  in  it;  and  the 
self-conscious  lover  of  life  cannot  otherwise  than  will 
his  own  continuous  existence.  To  desire  the  saving  of 
one’s  soul  in  this  sense  is  a  necessary  desire;1  and 
under  these  circumstances,  it  is  no  high  merit  to  remain 
indifferent  regarding  ways  and  means. 

But  prudence  is  not  the  noblest  of  the  virtues,  nor 
the  last  word  of  Christianity.  Buddhism  had  long  ago 
detected  the  moral  danger  of  an  indulgent  heaven- 
quest,  and  had  sought  to  make  ambition  commit  sui¬ 
cide  in  a  selflessness  without  desire.  It  sought  dispas- 
sion ;  and  it  sought  it  by  the  way  of  compassion,  because 

i  A  fact  which  is  not  altered  by  the  results  of  any  questionnaire, 
especially  of  a  questionnaire  circulated  among  the  more  sophisticated 
and  self -challenging  members  of  the  community,  as  in  the  enquiry  by 
Professor  James  H.  Leuba,  reported  in  The  Belief  in  God  and  Immor¬ 
tality. 


398 


CHKISTIANITY 


thereby  the  root  of  individuality  was  best  killed.  But 
it  is  no  easy  task  to  destroy  in  oneself  all  desire,  or  all 
the  skandhas  that  attach  to  individual  existence;  and 
if  one  enters  upon  and  persists  in  this  noble  and  ardu¬ 
ous  i  eightfold  path, 9  it  must  be  through  some  powerful 
impulsion.  In  truth,  ambition  is  the  essence  of  religion . 
There  is  always  possible  to  men  a  life  of  least  resist¬ 
ance,  taking  oneself  and  the  world  as  one  finds  them, 
accepting  the  horizon  of  nature.  If  one  repudiates  this 
and  takes  upon  himself  the  pains  of  a  Buddha,  it  is 
through  some  deep-laid  passion,  which  the  goal  of 
Buddhism,  as  defined  to  our  Western  ears,  hardly  ex¬ 
plains.  If  religion  destroys  ambition,  it  destroys  itself. 

The  solution  of  Christianity  perceives  this  principle. 
It  recognizes  as  does  Buddhism  the  faultiness  of 
heaven-seeking;  but  it  seeks  to  remedy  that  fault  by 
proceeding  in  the  opposite  direction, — by  carrying  am¬ 
bition  to  the  limit  of  its  own  meaning,  giving  a  final 
answer  to  the  question,  What  does  ambition  want f 

The  dialectic  of  experience  has  shown  us  from  many 
angles  how  the  quest  for  power  tends  to  revise  its  aim ; 
how  the  pursuit  of  power-over  becomes  the  pursuit  of 
power-for.  As  power  must  have  its  object,  it  is  so  far 
dependent  upon  the  existence  of  the  object,  and  must 
seek  its  welfare.  At  the  limit,  the  exercise  of  power 
is  indistinguishable  from  service ;  it  consists  in  giving 
or  in  adding  to  the  being  of  another.  Christianity  places 
itself  at  this  point  and  defines,  as  the  goal  of  the  trans¬ 
formation  of  ambition,  the  conferring  of  spiritual  life . 
The  compassion  which  in  Buddhism  is  the  corrective 


CHRISTIANITY  AND  AMBITION 


399 


of  the  self-centered  bent  of  the  will  is  present  here  also, 
but  with  a  different  meaning.  The  compassion  of 
Buddha  looks  on  the  world  of  men  as  caught  in  the 
error  of  individuality  and  its  consequent  suffering,  and 
in  releasing  them  wins  its  own  release.  The  compas¬ 
sion  of  Christianity  looks  on  a  world  of  men  as  lacking 
individuality  and  hence  unable  to  meet  suffering,  and 
in  confirming  their  selfhood  confirms  its  own. 

Ambition  in  this  form  is  the  most  characteristic 
product  of  Christianity  in  the  field  of  behavior.  It  is  the 
passion  for  the  historic  spread  of  the  new  community, 
or  in  more  personal  form,  the  “passion  for  souls.” 
Nothing  is  more  dominant  in  the  early  history  of  this 
cult  than  the  willingness  to  suffer,  to  be  despised,  to 
endure  all  things,  if  by  any  means  some  could  be  per¬ 
suaded  to  become  members  of  the  community,  the  king¬ 
dom  of  heaven  in  the  guise  of  a  militant  church  on 
earth. 

In  this  transformation,  ambition  does  not  lose  the 
other-worldly  sweep  of  the  transcendental  prudence  we 
were  speaking  of.  It  is  still  laying  hold  on  that  other 
world,  but  with  more  radical  power  than  is  implied  in 
simply  attaining  future  status  there.  It  is  indeed  far 
more  ambitious.  It  lays  hold  on  that  world  with  the 
intent  of  so  much  present  mastery  of  its  quality  and 
principle  as  to  weave  them  into  the  fabric  of  human 
history. 

This  passion  for  souls  we  have  described  as  the  final 
transformation  of  the  ambition  of  the  public  order; 
but  it  is  evidently  more  than  that.  It  is  the  same  form 


400 


CHRISTIANITY 


of  will  as  that  which  gave  the  final  meaning  to  human 
love,  the  will  to  confer  immortal  life.  It  is  likewise  the 
last  transformation  of  pugnacity,  the  will  to  displace 
evil  with  good.  It  is,  in  truth,  the  point  in  which  the 
meanings  of  all  instincts  converge.  It  is  the  positive 
meaning  given  by  Christianity  to  the  human  will  as 
a  whole.  ‘ Saving  one’s  soul,’  so  far  as  psychology  can 
deal  with  the  matter,  is  the  achieving  of  this  passion. 
‘  Conversion, ’  or  the  second-birth,  means  the  trans¬ 
lation  of  natural  impulses  into  terms  of  this  form  of 
the  will  to  power.  It  is  this  change  which  gave  Words¬ 
worth  his  maturity  in  that  moment  when  he  became  a 
‘dedicated  spirit.’  It  is  visible,  in  more  or  less  veiled 
form,  in  the  final  insights  of  Goethe’s  Faust,  of  Brown¬ 
ing’s  Paracelsus.  But  it  is  in  more  literal  and  potent 
fashion  the  force  behind  the  careers  of  Jesus  and  Paul, 
and,  apart  from  their  unfinished  metaphysics,  of 
Buddha  and  of  Socrates.  And  it  is  more  or  less  ob¬ 
scurely  the  motive  of  all  our  more  honorable  efforts  in 
education,  social  reform,  and  other  expressions  of 
parental  instinct. 

The  fact  that  these  several  instincts  come  together 
in  this  meaning  is  circumstantial  evidence  that  the 
meaning  is  a  true  interpretation  and  final  for  them  all. 
And  as  tested  by  experience,  it  has  been  a  successful 
interpretation.  It  has  become  for  many  men  an  ab¬ 
sorbing  and  satisfying  purpose.  And  from  the  stand¬ 
point  of  those  who  look  on  and  estimate  the  results  in 
terms  of  character,  there  is  little  disposition  to  question 
that  in  those  men  who  have  most  embodied  this  passion 
human  nature  has  touched  its  highest  points. 


CHRISTIANITY  AND  AMBITION 


401 


But  unless  the  direction  of  this  passion  had  been 
concrete  and  historical,  it  would  not  have  been  success¬ 
ful  in  winning  ascendency  in  a  human  will.  It  is  success¬ 
ful  only  because  and  so  far  as  it  retains  all  that  respect 
for  the  circumstances  of  the  physical  and  social  being 
that  we  saw  to  be  characteristic  of  affection  and  of 
pugnacity.  The  community  with  which  it  concerns  itself 
is  never  merely  an  invisible  church  of  all  the  loyal,  such 
as  Professor  Royce  had  in  mind  as  the  “  beloved  com¬ 
munity.  ’  ’  It  is  this ;  but  it  is  also  an  institution  among 
institutions,  having  its  own  work  in  the  world  and  its 
own  aims.  It  is  among  other  institutions  somewhat  as 
the  State  is  among  them,  while  in  its  purposes  it  in¬ 
cludes  them  and  reflects  upon  all  of  them.  Its  purpose 
is  to  hold  out  precisely  this  interpretation  of  their  wills 
to  all  men  as  being  the  adequate  interpretation;  to 
bring  all  plans  and  goods  into  subordination  to  this; 
and  thus,  while  nominally  undermining  all  other  insti¬ 
tutions,  to  pave  the  way  for  the  most  subtle  of  common 
understandings,  the  interracial  and  international  un¬ 
derstandings  which  are  crystallizing  in  the  shape  of  a 
world  culture  and  an  international  law.  Thus  Christi¬ 
anity  becomes  a  corporate  body  having  an  ambition  of 
its  own:  it  becomes  a  propaganda,  breaks  across  the 
provincial  boundaries  of  its  origin,  and  aspires  to  uni¬ 
versality.  Like  Buddhism  it  is  by  its  own  principle  a 
missionary  religion.  And  if  by  being  4 true’  we  mean 
among  other  things  being  awake  to  the  nature  of  one ’s 
business  in  this  world,  we  may  say  that  no  religion  is  a 
true  religion  which  does  not  in  this  way  aspire  to  be 
corporate  and  universal. 


402 


CHRISTIANITY 


For  the  most  part,  it  is  the  Catholic  Church,  rather 
than  the  Protestant  Church,  which  has  kept  to  the  con¬ 
crete  view  of  its  undertaking :  it  has  more  consistently 
approached  the  soul  through  its  physical  and  social  en¬ 
tanglements.  Protestantism  has  been  more  intellectual 
and  abstract.  But  there  are  not  a  few  men  in  whom 
both  types  are  united,  as  in  the  work  of  Livingstone, 
or  in  that  of  Dr.  Grenfell,  in  whom  the  medical  mission 
and  the  community  mission  are  combined.  All  tenden¬ 
cies  at  present  make  for  this  concreter  conception  of 
the  undertaking  in  which,  when  it  completely  under¬ 
stands  itself,  all  human  ambition  culminates. 


CHAPTER  XLIV 


THE  CRUX  OF  CHRISTIANITY 

IT  must  be  said,  however,  that  the  growing  concrete¬ 
ness  in  the  form  of  missionary  effort  among  Prot¬ 
estants  is  not  due  wholly  to  a  deepening  perception  of 
the  meaning  of  the  enterprise.  It  is  due  in  part  to  a 
sort  of  embarrassment  in  the  intellectual  preaching  of 
religion  as  propaganda.  The  mission  begins  to  be  re¬ 
garded  rather  as  an  educational  or  philanthropic  than 
as  a  religious  undertaking,  as  it  were  a  gift  of  culture, 
sustained  mainly  by  the  desire  to  be  serviceable  in  a 
pioneering  way.  The  attitude  of  the  prophet  or  evan¬ 
gelist,  keenly  conscious  of  the  vital  import  of  religious 
differences,  is  felt  to  be  less  natural  of  late,  as  if  the 
human  spirit  had  entered  upon  a  new  phase  of  self- 
consciousness. 

The  causes  of  this  change  are  many,  but  among  them 
I  believe  we  may  recognize  an  element  of  diffidence  in 
assuming  the  role  of  the  propagator  of  religion,  as  if 
that  role  were  somehow  presumptuous .  And  is  not  this 
the  case  ? 

Is  it  not  true  that  this  entire  interpretation  of  in¬ 
stinct  as  a  will  to  power,  and  of  the  will  to  power  as 
a  will  to  save  souls,  or  to  re-create  or  reform  or  edu¬ 
cate  mankind,  has  in  it  more  than  a  trace  of  presump¬ 
tion?  What  it  amounts  to  seems  to  be  this,  that  if  the 
complete  salvation  of  an  individual  will  requires  the 


404 


CHRISTIANITY 


transformation  of  all  its  instincts  into  the  will  to  save 
others,  we  must  be  saved  by  saving;  and  it  is  very 
doubtful  whether  in  our  unsaved  condition  we  have 
any  right  to  suppose  ourselves  competent  to  save.  We 
might  as  well  assume  the  right  to  forgive  sins.  For 
when  in  our  current  criticism  we  recognize  sin,  and 
when  we  subordinate  this  criticism  (as  we  thought  we 
should)  to  a  spirit  of  creative  justice,  what  is  this  but 
an  attempt  to  displace  a  will  defined  by  us  as  evil  by 
a  good  will  likewise  of  our  own  definition?  But  can 
we  be  certain  either  that  that  evil  is  really  evil,  or  that 
which  seems  good  to  us  is  absolutely  good? 

An  attitude  in  which  one  detects  himself  subtly 
usurping  the  functions  of  Deity,  while  wholly  vigorous 
and  unblushing  in  the  activities  of  an  earlier  genera¬ 
tion,  has  become  all  but  impossible  to  a  large  part  of 
our  contemporary  self-consciousness.  There  is  an 
evident  disinclination  to  walk  out  very  far  on  any 
venture  of  moral  judgment,  through  a  sense  that  this 
judgment  is  most  likely  to  mislead  when  it  is  most 
conscious.  There  is  a  preference  to  acknowledge  quite 
frankly  the  tendencies  of  the  less  ethically  effortful 
self,  to  confess  one’s  egoism,  one’s  ambitions,  one’s 
enjoyment  of  praise,  to  let  one’s  tempers,  dislikes,  and 
affections  have  their  say,  because  after  all  one  must 
be  sincere  and  what  one  is  does  the  talking  in  any  case. 
In  all  speculations  about  what  human  beings  finally 
want,  our  formulae  are  likely  to  do  violence  to  hidden 
impulses  while  they  satisfy  the  obvious  ones.  And 
this  moral  self-propagation  which  we  have  reached  as 
the  best  meaning  of  the  will  seems  to  do  violence  to  an 


THE  CKUX  OF  CHEISTIANITY 


405 


intuitive  hesitation  to  regard  one’s  moral  self  as  ever 
quite  worthy  of  being  propagated. 

We  have  not,  however,  been  asserting  that  our  ideal 
is  practicable ;  we  have  been  asserting  that  it  is  what 
Christianity  demands,  and  that  if  it  could  be  attained 
it  would  satisfy  the  will.  The  difficulty  we  have  just 
encountered  affords  additional  evidence  that  our  in¬ 
terpretation  of  Christian  requirements  is  the  true  one. 
For  original  Christianity  encountered  precisely  ther 
same  criticism  of  its  aims,  namely,  that  they  are  pre¬ 
sumptuous.  Was  it  not  this  very  charge  that  led  to 
the  crucifixion,  and  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  judges 
perhaps  justly  so?  For  did  not  this  man  profess  to 
forgive  sins,  and  in  other  ways  make  himself  equal 
with  God  ?  And  did  he  not  hand  over  the  keys  of  heaven 
and  hell  to  his  followers  ?  He  professed  to  save  others, 
and  it  was  a  pointed  gibe,  regarded  as  equivalent  to  a 
refutation,  that  he  could  not  save  himself.  In  political 
translation,  the  offence  of  the  man  was  in  his  pretended 
kingship,  the  true  substance  of  which  was  his  self- 
asserted  mastery  over  the  souls  of  men.  Historically 
speaking,  the  crux  of  Christianity  is  its  element  of 
presumption. 

For  the  same  reason  Christianity  aroused  the  an¬ 
tagonism  of  the  Roman  State,  hospitable  to  nearly 
every  foreign  cult.  For  the  Christian  community  re¬ 
garded  itself  in  a  wholly  unique  and  arrogant  light: 
it  presumed  to  provide  a  salvation  which  made  salva¬ 
tion  in  the  State  unnecessary,  and  supreme  devotion 
to  the  State  impossible.  It  claimed  to  be  a  kingdom 


406 


CHRISTIANITY 


in  which  the  whole  world  conld,  and  eventually  would, 
find  refuge.  It  compelled  choices,  and  announced  a 
competition  for  allegiance,  whereas  other  religions 
were  content  with  combined  loyalties.  In  brief,  it 
assumed  to  be  right,  to  possess  the  Way;  and  the  pre¬ 
tence  of  divine  right  implied  in  its  passion  for  souls 
was  as  little  palatable  to  Rome  as  it  is  to  the  ethical 
diffidence  of  the  present  hour. 

There  would  be  little  or  no  fault  to  find  with  the 
standard  set  up  by  Christianity,  if  it  were  only  re¬ 
served  from  being  professed  and  administered  by 
human  beings.  Religion  can  hardly  do  less,  perhaps, 
than  demand  the  complete  transformation  of  instinct; 
and  the  definition  of  the  goal  of  human  nature  is  not 
refuted  by  the  feeling  that  no  human  being  is  quite 
qualified  to  adopt  it.  And  further  (if  we  are  right)  it 
is  not  Christianity  alone,  but  the  dialectic  of  our  own 
experience,  that  leads  to  the  requirement  we  have 
stated.  The  only  thing  we  can  justly  demand  of  Chris¬ 
tianity,  if  it  makes  itself  responsible  for  this  ideal, 
is  an  answer  to  the  question,  How  is  this  transforma¬ 
tion  possible ! 


CHAPTER  XLY 


THE  THEORY  OF  PARTICIPATION 

USAGE  has  identified  the  word  Christianity  with 
a  type  of  disposition, — one  whose  main  ingredient 
is  a  sentiment  of  human  charity,  embedded  in  a  meta¬ 
physical  faith  and  hope.  And  when  scholars  began  to 
address  themselves  to  the  question,  What  is  the  essence 
of  Christianity?  many  of  them  accepted  this  usage  and 
assumed  that  the  essence  in  question  is  to  be  sought  in 
some  standard  for  human  character  such  as  we  have 
been  considering. 

But  if  this  assumption  were  true  it  would  be  hard  to 
find  a  sufficient  reason  why  the  ideal  in  question  should 
he  called  by  the  special  name  of  Christianity.  For  quite 
apart  from  the  historic  fact  that  many  elements  of  the 
Christian  ideal  have  been  found  in  other  places  and 
traditions,  there  is  no  good  reason  why  the  ideal  in  its 
general  form  should  not  become  a  common  possession 
of  psychology.  So  far  as  it  is  the  outcome  of  the  dialectic 
of  experience,  which  is  the  same  everywhere,  it  must 
in  time  become  such  a  common  possession,  enriched 
indeed  by  the  various  historic  modes  of  approach  and 
expression,  but  the  better  domesticated  in  the  human 
family  for  being,  in  substance,  free  from  any  special 
channel  of  communication.1 

i  It  has  been  said,  as  by  Professor  G.  B.  Foster,  that  the  characteristic 
thing  about  Christianity  is  not  its  statable  ideal,  but  the  embodiment 


408 


CHRISTIANITY 


It  is  not  in  any  set  of  moral  precepts,  nor  in  any 
view  of  the  transformation  of  instinct,  that  the  essence 
of  Christianity  is  to  be  found,  but  rather  in  its  answer 
to  the  question,  How  is  this  transformation  possible! 
Or,  to  put  the  question  in  Kantian  form,  How  is  ethical 
experience  possible!  Every  religion  makes  its  de¬ 
mands;  but  its  special  obligation,  as  a  religion,  is  to 
show  how  these  demands  may  he  met.  The  religion  is 
to  be  identified  not  by  its  ethics  but  by  its  theory  of 
salvation  and  by  its  actual  provision  for  saving  human 
individuals  in  their  historic  context. 

The  necessity  for  such  a  theory  lies  in  the  fact  that, 
as  we  have  seen,  the  demands  themselves  involve  a 
practical  dilemma.  This  dilemma,  the  fundamental 
problem  of  Christianity,  we  may  restate  somewhat 
formally  as  follows.  We  cannot  satisfy  our  wills,  nor 
the  demands  upon  them,  without  adopting  the  attitude 
of  creative  artist  toward  our  milieu.  This  attitude, 
however,  for  human  beings,  is  presumption.  It  is  such 
an  attitude  as  only  a  divine  being  would  be  fully  justi¬ 
fied  in  taking.  As  for  us,  no  demand  could  be  more 
reasonable  than  that  we  should  first  cast  the  beam  out 
of  our  own  eye,  before  undertaking  to  give  light  to 
others.  But  the  difficulty  is  that  we  can  only  get  rid  of 
the  beam  through  this  very  undertaking.  To  be  dis- 

of  this  ideal  in  a  person.  And  it  is  certainly  true  that  such  embodiment 
makes  any  type  of  disposition  more  available  and  impressive  than  any 
possible  theoretical  statement  could  be.  But  what  this  personality  means 
to  men  is  in  any  case  a  universal,  and  one  which  the  founder  of  Chris¬ 
tianity  tried  to  state  as  well  as  to  exemplify;  and  any  such  universal 
meaning  must  be  capable  of  theoretic  statement  and  verification,  and  so, 
in  the  end,  be  detached  from  the  accident  of  its  historic  emergence. 


THE  THEOEY  OF  PAETICIPATION  409 

posed  to  save  others,  we  must  first  be  saved  ourselves ; 
yet  to  be  saved  ourselves  we  must  be  disposed  to  save 
others.  On  the  ground  of  the  moral  order  alone  there 
is  no  way  out  of  this  circle. 

But  Christianity  proposes  a  way  out.  It  relieves  the 
individual  at  once  of  the  burden  of  supposing  that  it 
is  through  any  merit  or  power  of  his  own  that  he  can 
save  others;  the  power  is  conferred  upon  him  by  way 
of  a  loan.  It  is  nothing  inherent  in  us  that  is  to  do  the 
work,  but  something  in  which  we  participate .  What 
this  means  may  appear  through  analogies  from  the  field 
of  knowledge. 

One  who  knows  an  object  becomes  to  some  degree  a 
partaker  in  the  qualities  of  the  object.  Knowledge  has 
for  its  special  business  the  reaching  across  from  self 
to  what  is  not-self,  and  making  that  not-self,  so  far 
as  its  qualities  can  be  appreciated,  an  appurtenance 
of  the  self.  What  I  know  of  any  real  object  is  never 
the  object  in  full,  but  a  selection  of  my  own:  I  know 
as  much  of  it  as  I  can  ‘take  in,’ — the  phrase  is  accurate. 
Any  quality  which  I  appreciate  enough  to  remember 
and  name  has  already  begun  to  be  a  permanent  source 
of  change  in  me ;  but  even  if  I  merely  gaze  on  an  object, 
all  that  I  succeed  in  taking  in  is  at  that  moment  an 
element  in  my  being.  What  we  call  an  ‘idea’  is  a  quality 
of  an  object  in  so  far  as  it  has  become  a  property  of  a 
self.  Participation  of  this  kind2  is  particularly  natural 
and  direct  in  the  case  of  personal  qualities  and  values. 

2  In  the  Platonic  theory  of  participation,  it  is  the  object  that  par¬ 
ticipates  in  the  ideas.  According  to  the  view  here  proposed  it  is  the 
self  which  through  the  idea  participates  in  the  object,  without  enquiring 


410 


CHRISTIANITY 


I  may  witness  an  heroic  deed  and  be  no  hero  nor  become 
one :  but  if  I  appreciate  its  heroism  I  become  at  least 
momentarily  a  partaker  of  its  quality.  The  psychology 
of  masses  and  of  political  movements  frequently  ex¬ 
hibits  this  principle,  which  is  more  fundamental  than 
that  of  imitation.  Mazzini  gave  Italy  an  army  of  heroes ; 
but  their  valor  was  not  at  first  an  intrinsic  quality  of 
themselves.  It  was  a  quality  of  their  leader,  and  became 
theirs  through  their  knowledge  of  him.  With  another 
leader  it  might  well  have  remained  not  alone  latent,  but 
non-existent.  Much  of  the  hope  of  democracy  lies  in  the 
fact  that  no  set  of  psychological  tests  can  ever  tell  what 
any  man  or  body  of  men  is  capable  of.  All  men  rise  to 
the  level  of  their  leaders  in  so  far  as  they  understand 
them  and  believe  in  them.3 

Through  this  participation  of  the  self  in  its  object 
there  arises  the  paradox  that  the  same  act  of  appre¬ 
ciation  which  confers  greatness  upon  a  self  reveals  to 
that  self  its  habitual  littleness.  It  was  Socrates  who 
burned  into  our  memories  the  truth  that  the  beginning 
of  wisdom  may  be  the  knowledge  of  our  ignorance. 
But  in  another  form  this  same  truth  has  been  the  com¬ 
mon  possession  of  all  the  mystics.  For  their  insistence 
upon  the  inadequacy  of  concepts  and  definitions  is  an- 

whether  the  object  itself  has  an  original  or  a  communicated  being. 
Ideas  in  this  sense  are  not  conceived  as  eternal  patterns  but  as  living 
processes  of  osmosis  between  self  and  not-self. 

s  It  is  this  factor  of  belief,  with  the  implied  act  of  affirmation,  that 
marks  the  distinction  between  the  effect  of  knowing  the  good  and 
knowing  the  evil  qualities  of  things.  There  is  a  degree  of  participation 
involved  in  the  knowledge  of  evil,  even  for  scientific  purposes.  But 
the  non-consent  that  goes  with  such  knowledge,  if  deep  enough  to  remain 
in  subconsciousness  with  it,  limits  the  area  of  its  remaking  of  the  self. 


THE  THEORY  OF  PARTICIPATION  411 

other  way  of  saying  that  a  true  knowledge  of  reality 
makes  all  prior  ideas  appear  as  so  many  limitations  or 
negations.  Likewise  in  the  world  of  the  will :  if  one  finds 
and  appreciates  anything  holy  in  the  world,  the  parti¬ 
cipation  in  that  holiness  it  at  the  same  time  a  destruc¬ 
tion  of  moral  conceit.  And  this,  I  believe,  explains  the 
emphasis  of  Christianity  upon  humility.  Humility  is 
not  a  virtue ;  but  it  is  a  condition  without  which  the  kind 
of  virtue  demanded  by  Christianity  is  not  possible :  it  is 
an  infallible  result  of  perceiving  in  any  adequate  way 
what  kind  of  will  it  is  that  is  needed  to  do  a  man’s  work 
in  the  world.  It  is  a  result  of  beginning  to  participate  in 
that  will. 

Now  to  possess  goodness  in  this  participatory 
fashion  is  not  to  be  good,  but  only  to  begin  being  good. 
But  as  long  as  the  appreciation  is  alive  (and  this  is 
vital  to  the  whole  matter)  the  incipent  possession  of 
goodness  may  do  the  work  of  goodness  itself.  What 
the  man  sees  becomes  the  working  part  of  the  man.  This 
principle  explains  and  justifies  the  tendency  which  we 
found  general  in  society  of  taking  men  on  the  basis  of 
their  hopes  rather  than  of  their  achievements:  what 
men  reach  out  to  will  do  some  part  of  its  proper  work 
through  them,  if  not  by  them.  This  is  especially  true  of 
those  who  labor,  as  poets  do,  to  bring  to  earth  an  in¬ 
sight  which  is  still  marginal  and  vague  to  themselves. 
The  men  who  dimly  perceived  ‘ 4  Liberty,  Equality,  Fra¬ 
ternity,”  had  their  effect  in  spite  of  the  haziness  of 
their  vision:  this  effect  was  certainly  not  due  to  the 
haze,  nor  much  helped  by  it,  but  neither  was  it  delayed 
until  their  insight  was  perfectly  defined.  There  is  some 


412 


CHRISTIANITY 


ground  for  thinking  that  no  idea  is  wholly  definite  until 
it  is  dead.  Those  books  and  writers  appear  greatest  to  us 
who  make  connections  with  the  surmises  of  our  minds, 
because  they  have  been  able  to  give  substance  to  the  sur¬ 
mises  of  their  own :  we  can  only  on  this  ground  under¬ 
stand  the  effect,  not  alone  of  most  of  the  great  seers  and 
of  most  of  the  bibles,  but  of  many  a  writer  within  the 
period  of  the  world’s  4 4 enlightenment, ’ ’  of  Bunyan,  of 
Locke,  of  Kant,  of  William  James.  In  this  there  is  no 
glorification  of  an  obscure  idea  because  it  is  obscure; 
for  the  only  justification  any  idea  can  have  is  that  it 
makes  connection  with  objects  as  they  are.  But  it  sug¬ 
gests  that  waiting  for  finished  neatness  may  have  some¬ 
thing  unduly  cautious  about  it.  The  appreciations  we 
have  should  begin  their  active  march  when  those  ap¬ 
preciations  arise  as  convictions  within  the  mind.  There 
is  an  element  of  vanity  in  waiting  until  we  think  we  are 
all  that  we  admire  before  we  allow  ourselves  to  com¬ 
municate  our  admiration.  To  know  that  we  work  less 
through  what  we  are  than  through  what  we  worship  is 
a  great  economy  of  pride. 

And  it  is  also  an  economy  of  time.  For  to  wait  for 
fitness  would  mean  in  most  cases  to  wait  till  the  end 
of  eternity.  The  only  indispensable  fitness  is  the  capa¬ 
city  for  appreciating  or  reverencing  the  object — as  the 
greatness  of  a  Boswell  or  a  Tolstoy  lies  less  in  personal 
force  than  in  what  we  are  pleased  to  call  immense  4  4  ob¬ 
jectivity” — and  this  capacity  for  reverence  is  often 
greatest  in  the  newest  or  remotest  initiate.  This  is  at 
least  part  of  the  meaning  of  the  doctrine  of  the  Incar¬ 
nation.  The  perfect  dwells  in  the  imperfect  now ,  in  so> 


THE  THEORY  OF  PARTICIPATION  413 

far  as  the  imperfect  takes  the  perfect  for  an  object,  and 
it  does  now  the  work  of  the  perfect. 

Thus,  the  fact  of  participation  makes  it  possible  to 
act  as  gods  without  presumption.  With  every  element 
of  self-assertion  in  the  work  of  education,  or  propa¬ 
gating  a  national  type  of  mind,  or  laboring  for  any 
causes  such  as  involve  persuading  men,  or  loyally  hold¬ 
ing  to  instead  of  turning  away  from  some  one  whose 
fault  has  become  patent,  or  with  whatever  other  form 
of  saving  human  nature,  comes  in  the  same  instant  its 
antidote :  “Yet  not  I,  but  whatever  I  have  found  visibly 
divine  in  the  world,  worketh  in  me.”  If  the  reader  has 
found  himself  irked  by  our  constant  (and  admittedly 
faulty)  use  of  the  phrase  ‘will  to  power,’  the  sting  of 
that  term  is  now  finally  drawn.  There  is  power  in  the 
world,  and  such  power  as  I  must  wield  if  I  am  to  find 
what  I  mean  by  living ;  but  that  power,  even  if  it  resides 
in  me  for  a  moment,  is  very  little  mine.  Far  from  a  testi¬ 
mony  to  my  ability  if  I  accomplish  something  with  it, 
it  is  a  comment  on  my  culpable  lack  of  faith  if  I  fail  to 
work  miracles  with  it. 

But  while  this  principle  furnishes  a  partial  answer 
to  our  question,  How  is  this  transformation  possible? 
it  is  not  a  complete  answer.  For  to  participate  in  the 
nature  of  God,  it  is,  by  this  principle,  first  necessary 
to  see  God.  And  it  is  only  those  who  are  already  pure 
in  heart  that  can  see  God.  Participation  would  remove 
imperfection,  or  begin  the  removal;  but  the  imper¬ 
fection  obscures  my  vision,  and  so  bars  effective  par¬ 
ticipation. 


414 


CHRISTIANITY 


This  dilemma  is  not  one  that  we  can  banish  by  ignor¬ 
ing  it,  or  living  complacently  with  it  in  onr  ordinary 
will-to-muddle-through.  We  have  said  that  ambition  is 
the  stuff  of  which  religion  is  made ;  it  is,  if  you  like,  the 
instinct  to  do  one’s  living  well.  It  is  characteristic  of 
animal  life  to  live  in  accommodations,  and  piece  out  by 
‘vitality’  the  inconsistencies  of  ideas:  it  is  character¬ 
istic  of  religion  to  seek  out  all  rankling  roots  of  dis¬ 
satisfaction  and  clash  of  meaning,  to  drive  latent  prob¬ 
lems  out  from  cover  rather  than  cloak  them,  to  declare 
relentless  hostility  to  our  animal  and  ‘vital’  ease.4  It  is 
religion  that  compels  us  to  face  this  logical  impasse. 

Nor  can  we  escape  the  difficulty  by  placing  the  vision 
of  God,  as  Plato  does,  at  the  end  of  a  long  ascent  in 
the  dialectic  ladder,  with  a  fine  gradation  in  the  stages 
of  the  journey.  For  at  each  stage  the  dilemma,  in  prin¬ 
ciple,  recurs.  The  next  step  in  approaching  the  vision 
of  the  Good,  wherever  you  now  stand,  requires  as  its 

4  One  of  the  most  unfortunate  results  of  letting  ‘life’  take  care  of 
this  particular  puzzle  is  the  adoption  of  a  properly  humble  attitude 
toward  all  enterprises  which  might  imply  faith  in  one’s  own  type  of 
mind,  i.e.,  faith  in  one’s  faith.  This  type  of  humility  is  seldom  socially 
obnoxious,  because  it  is  for  the  most  part  amiable;  it  is  not  often 
observed  that  by  its  irresponsibility  it  is  the  dry  rot  of  all  democracy. 
When  it  appears  in  excess,  we  recognize  in  Uriah  Heep  the  epitome  of 
all  that  Nietzsche  properly  hates,  and  mankind  with  him.  But  whether 
or  not  in  excess,  the  moral  and  logical  fault  is  the  same.  To  take 
humility  as  the  essence  of  Christianity  is  to  mistake  its  symptom  for  its 
essence,  and  to  fancy  that  because  the  poor  in  spirit  are  blessed,  one  can 
become  poor  in  spirit  at  will.  The  true  relation  of  things  is  that  the 
pure  in  heart  catch  a  glimpse  of  God,  and  they  who  see  God  become 
humble.  All  other  humility  is  hypocrisy.  And  the  problem  then  recurs, 
How  can  the  imperfect  mind  see  God?  This  problem  is  not  escaped  by 
letting  it  heal  over. 


THE  THEORY  OF  PARTICIPATION 


415 


precondition  that  very  purity  which  is  its  own  natural 
result,  and  which  the  relatively  impure  will  cannot  put 
on  for  itself.  The  question  is  the  ancient  one,  How  can 
a  man  know  God! 


CHAPTER  XL VI 


THE  DIVINE  AGGRESSION 

LET  me  resume  the  logic  of  our  situation  in  terms  of 
J  an  experience  common  in  principle.  In  recent  years 
playwrights  have  once  more  ventured  to  bring  upon 
the  stage  the  miracle-working  divine  character;  and 
the  reception  accorded  such  plays  as  “The  Servant 
in  the  House,’ ’  “The  Passing  of  the  Third  Floor 
Back,”  shows  that  human  nature  is  ready  to  recognize 
and  respond  to  its  natural  destiny.  What  one  sees 
there  one  admits  without  parley  as  the  strongest  thing 
in  the  world;  and  further,  in  so  far  as  one  is  moved 
by  it,  one  is  for  the  moment  participating  in  that  type 
of  power.  Suppose  that  the  conviction  were  deep 
enough  to  disarm  the  habitual  playgoer’s  defences, 
and  to  persist  into  the  life  of  the  next  day.  It  would 
meet  certain  obstacles  which  the  playwright  had  not 
included  in  the  difficulties,  let  us  say,  of  the  Servant 
in  the  House.  For  in  the  first  place  this  Servant  is 
steadily  in  the  right,  and  knows  himself  for  what  he 
is ;  but  when  criticism  must  both  be  given  and  received, 
the  role  of  the  divine  can  with  difficulty  be  sustained. 
This  is  one  of  the  embarrassments  I  should  encounter. 

But  looking  deeper,  I  should  find  the  fundamental 
difficulty  to  be  this :  that  I  do  not,  as  a  fact,  care  enough 
for  either  God  or  men  to  play  this  part  with  success. 
I  certainly  do  not  see  them  in  a  light  that  compels  my 


THE  DIVINE  AGGEESSION 


417 


complete  affection.  This  is  due  to  the  fact  that,  being 
what  I  am,  I  find  in  my  dealings  with  the  world 
hindrance,  deprivation,  pain,  to  an  extent  that  leaves 
me  highly  unreconciled  and  at  heart  protesting.  Being 
what  I  am,  I  say, — because  it  may  well  be  that  if  my 
instincts  were  completely  transformed  I  should  judge 
things  differently.  If  I  could  love  God,  I  might  over¬ 
come  or  understand  deprivation  and  suffering;  and 
if  I  could  accept  deprivation  and  suffering  I  might 
love  God.  But  as  it  is,  I  remain  a  critic  of  the  divine 
economy  and  hence  of  God  himself ;  and  the  vision 
that  might  transform  me  is  closed  to  me.  It  is  the 
unresolved  problem  of  evil  that  stands  in  the  way  of 
the  saving  of  my  soul.  I  am  unable  to  see  the  divine 
as  an  object  of  admiration,  not  to  say  adoration.  God, 
if  there  is  a  God,  is  a  blunderer,  or  a  malicious  play- 
maker,  or  finite  and  helpless,  or  callous,  or  blind.  Such 
is  the  summary  value-judgment  that  without  consult¬ 
ing  any  deliberate  thought  of  mine  my  instincts,  in 
their  present  state,  are  incessantly  reaffirming. 

And  apart  from  what  our  lips  or  our  theories  tell  us, 
this  is  perhaps  the  commonest  of  commonplace  atti¬ 
tudes  toward  the  universe.  The  socialized  human  being 
looks  with  a  natural  skepticism  upon  any  proposition 
to  the  effect  that  there  is  a  wholly  good  God.  So  far 
as  we  can  see  into  the  structure  of  the  world,  it  is  a 
place  in  which  our  instincts  are  not  alone  unsatisfied, 
but  unsatisfiable.  If  religion  has  been  blind  to  this 
situation,  religion  might  as  well  quit  the  stage. 

But  religion  is  not  blind  to  this  situation;  it  is  the 
first  to  announce  that  there  is  nothing  in  the  world 


418 


CHKISTIANITY 


of  men  and  nature,  as  we  naturally  see  it,  that  can 
justly  claim  a  complete  allegiance.  It  sides  completely 
with  our  civilized  skepticism  on  this  point;  and  it  not 
only  admits,  but  asserts,  that  of  ourselves  we  cannot 
see  things  in  any  other  way.  It  adds,  simply,  that  what 
we  cannot  do  for  ourselves  another  must  do  for  us; 
our  reconciliation  with  reality  must  be  brought  to  us 
from  outside.  The  salvation  of  a  soul  requires  a  divine 
intervention. 

II 

The  idea  of  salvation  from  outside  is  offensive  to 
our  sentiment  of  moral  independence.  It  is  offensive, 
however,  chiefly  when  we  think  of  righteousness  as  a 
course  of  right  action  or  decision  such  as  every  man 
must  effect  for  himself,  rather  than  as  a  state  of  right 
valuing  such  as  no  man  by  solitary  effort  can  reach. 
Experience  should  throw  some  light  on  what  men  need 
and  can  use  in  ‘ working  out  their  salvation.’  The 
experience  of  India  is  especially  worth  considering, 
because  it  is  in  India  that  the  greatest  religions  of 
self-help,  Brahmanism  and  early  Buddhism,  have  run 
their  course.  It  is  not  without  meaning  that  while  on 
the  soil  of  India  Brahmanism  has  declined  and  Bud¬ 
dhism  has  largely  disappeared  in  favor  of  religions 
teaching  divine  help  and  human  dependence,  both  have 
taken  on  as  it  were  departments  of  supernatural  aid 
foreign  to  their  original  logic.1  And  farther  west, 

i  Professor  J.  E.  Carpenter  quotes  a  modern  Hindu  prayer  which 
shows  well  the  spirit  of  the  predominant  piety  of  Hinduism, — the  bhakti- 
piety,  which  seeks  an  influx  of  divine  power  such  as  endows  the  soul 
with  mastery  over  its  earthly  nature  not  essentially  different  from  the 


THE  DIVINE  AGGRESSION 


419 


from  the  sixth  century  b.c.  onward,  the  spread  of  the 
private  mysteries  whose  purport  was  to  bring  the 
initiate  through  various  sacraments  into  effective 
union  with  a  god  who  had  suffered  and  was  disposed 
to  redeem  his  soul,  may  be  read  in  the  same  light.  The 
vogue  and  earnestness  of  many  of  these  mysteries 
certainly  imply  a  development  of  individual  self-con¬ 
sciousness  and  cosmic  anxiety  such  as  the  corporate 
national  religions  were  no  longer  able  wholly  to  ap¬ 
pease;  the  race  was  then  beginning  to  recognize  in 
a  groping  fashion  that  the  self,  so  far  as  society  could 
help  it  to  its  own,  was  inadequately  helped  and  in  much 
danger  of  being  lost;  it  had  begun  to  define  the  prob¬ 
lem  which  religion  in  its  distinction  from  the  national 
life  had  to  solve.  And  we  may  regard  Christianity  as 
one  of  the  latest  of  the  solutions  of  this  problem,  con¬ 
taining  the  kernel  of  all  the  other  mysteries,  and  sur¬ 
viving  them  because  it  was  fit  to  survive.  Read  in  this 

mana  of  aboriginal  and  eternal  human  piety  except  in  its  primarily 
moral  impact :  1  1  O  Lord  of  the  Universe,  O  All-Consciousness,  presiding 
Deity  of  all,  Vishnu,  at  thy  bidding  and  to  please  thee  alone  I  rise  this 
morning  and  enter  on  the  discharge  of  my  daily  duties.  I  know  what 
is  righteous,  yet  I  feel  no  attraction  for  it ;  I  know  what  is  not  righteous, 
yet  I  have  no  repulsion  from  it.  O  Lord  of  the  senses,  O  Thou  seated 
in  the  heart,  may  I  do  thy  commands  as  ordered  by  thee  in  my  con¬ 
science.  ”  ( Comparative  Beligion,  p.  158.)  The  Krishna  of  the 

Bhagavad-Gita  may  be  regarded  as  the  Brahmanical  form  of  the  divine- 
human  deliverer  from  passion  and  all  earthly  attachments.  And  Bud¬ 
dhism  has  produced  such  conceptions  as  that  of  Avalokite^vara,  who 
made  a  vow  not  to  accept  his  own  release  until  the  demons  themselves 
as  well  as  all  men  should  be  enlightened  and  saved,  the  Amithabha 
Buddha  “of  boundless  Light, ”  who,  carried  to  China  and  Japan,  be¬ 
comes  the  holy  Amida,  by  whose  exertions  alone  new  hearts  are  conferred 
upon  men. 


420 


CHRISTIANITY 


way,  religions  experience  gives  strong  support  to  the 
view  that  salvation  from  outside  is  needed. 

But  we  may  also  read  all  this,  as  Professor  Gilbert 
Murray  is  inclined  to  read  it,  as  a  symptom  of  political 
disintegration  and  a  colossal  and  widespread  “  failure 
of  nerve.  ’  ’  The  facts  of  history  never  yield  a  conclusive 
principle  for  their  own  judgment.  For  such  a  principle 
we  must  look  to  psychology, — that  is,  to  our  own  knowl¬ 
edge  of  ourselves. 

And  certainly  the  idea  of  salvation  from  outside  is 
not  without  psychological  support,  or,  for  that  matter, 
biological  support.  For  life  itself,  so  far  as  experience 
yet  shows,  always  comes  from  outside,  from  prior  life, 
as  something  conferred,  not  acquired.2  It  is  not  out 
of  natural  order  that  certain  parts  or  ingredients  of 
life  should  come  in  the  same  way,  as  by  a  mental  epi¬ 
genesis.  Such  an  addition  from  without  can  frequently 
be  verified  in  the  transition  from  one  level  of  value  to 
another,  at  times  when  a  person  seems  unable  to  ac¬ 
complish  that  transition  for  himself.  For  example,  I 
am  told  to  cheer  up  and  take  things  with  a  grain  of 
humor.  But  how  is  humor  possible  to  me,  if  as  a  fact 
I  am  morose?  Probably  it  is  not  possible  by  any  solemn 
effort  I  may  make  for  it ;  but  there  are  persons  whose 
entrance  can  make  it  possible,  and  all  but  force  it  upon 
me.  Or,  how  is  confidence  possible,  if  as  a  fact  I  am 
afraid?  It  is  not  possible,  and  my  efforts  to  reassure 

2  Fichte,  for  whom  the  moral  will  is  the  supreme  reality,  tried  to 
explain  the  emergence  of  a  personal  self  into  existence  as  an  act  of  its 
own  freedom;  but  not  even  Fichte’s  ingenuity  succeeded  in  giving  the 
hypothesis  a  footing. 


THE  DIVINE  AGGRESSION 


421 


myself,  by  confessing  my  fears,  confirm  them.  But  I 
can  do  a  great  deal  to  ‘take’  heart  at  the  summons  of 
one  who  has  it,  or  even  at  the  memory  of  a  voice  that 
is  charged  with  it.  These  processes  may  be  processes 
of  participation;  but  they  are  frequently  of  a  more 
active  sort  on  the  part  of  the  other  mind,  like  an  in¬ 
tentional  and  aggressive  imposing  of  a  state  of  mind 
upon  me.3  They  appeal  to  the  consent  of  the  self -to-be 
rather  than  to  the  consent  of  the  present  self,  though 
unless  something  in  that  present  self  gave  consent  the 
state  could  not  be  imposed. 

These  facts  imply  that  the  self  is  not  a  closed  monad 
in  its  moral  life  any  more  than  in  its  mental  and 
physical  life.  Just  as  there  is  a  mental  hunger  for  new 
data  to  be  ingested  into  our  mental  substance,  a  hunger 
which  we  sometimes  call  6 curiosity,’  and  sometimes 
the  ‘empirical  attitude’  of  mind,  so  there  is  a  moral 
appetite  which  has  as  yet  no  name,  but  which  makes 
a  part  of  our  social  appetite.  For  in  social  intercourse 
we  receive  here  and  there  not  alone  new  data,  but  new 
inductions  already  well  grown,  new  ideas  ready  to 
transplant  and  mature,  new  attitudes  toward  experi¬ 
ence  as  a  whole, — almost,  one  might  say,  new  selfhood. 
We  remain  ourselves  in  all  this,  because  we  choose 
what  we  admit ;  but  we  become  as  it  were  the  spirit  of  a 
living  society  of  included  selves,  receiving  constant 
accessions  not  alone  by  germination  from  within  but 
also  by  adoption  from  without.  It  is  because  of  this 
openness  of  mind  on  their  part  that  our  neighbors,  if 

3  This  process  is  doubtless  akin  to  suggestion,  but  it  is  more  direct 
and  avowed  to  the  subject  than  suggestion  is. 


422 


CHRISTIANITY 


we  were  competent,  might  be  saved  by  us  (as  we  have 
all  along  assumed) ;  and  it  is  by  this  same  openness 
of  mind  that  we,  if  there  were  a  competent  other,  might 
be  saved.  The  question,  How  is  love  to  God  or  to  men 
possible  if  as  a  fact  I  do  not  have  it?  would  be  answered 
if  there  were,  as  the  moving  spirit  of  the  world,  an 
aggressive  lover  able  and  disposed  to  break  in  upon 
my  temper  of  critical  egoism  and  win  my  response. 
This  would  seem  to  be  a  necessary,  if  not  a  sufficient, 
condition  of  ‘  salvation  ’ ;  and  thus  far  psychology  lends 
support  to  our  reading  of  the  history  of  religion, 
namely,  that  in  the  development  of  the  private  mystery, 
religion  was  finding  its  way  to  a  knowledge  of  the  actual 
needs  of  men.  How  Christianity  proposes  to  meet  those 
needs  we  may  state  in  our  own  way. 

Ill 

Plato  and  Aristotle  represented  God  as  that  abso¬ 
lute  good  which,  unmoving  and  changeless  in  itself, 
the  soul  pursues  and  longs  for.  To  Christianity,  it  is 
the  soul  that  is  pursued;  and  God  is  forever  restless, 
in  quest  of  what  to  him  is  lost.  The  God  of  the  Chris¬ 
tian  is  one  who  invades  the  earth  in  order  to  bring 
men  to  themselves:  to  every  soul  of  man  he  “ stands 
at  the  door  and  knocks.’ ’  He  does  not  forgo  the  power 
of  silent  attraction  found  in  the  non-assertive  Tao  of 
Lao  Tze,  or  in  Brahm,  or  in  the  Unmoved  Mover  of 
the  Greek ;  but  it  is  as  one  who  has  known  finitude  and 
is  Gifted  up  from  the  the  earth’  that  he  will  draw  all 
men  unto  him.  He  disguises  himself,  takes  the  form  of 
a  servant ;  he  comes  to  his  own  and  his  own  know  him 


THE  DIVINE  AGGRESSION 


423 


not;  lie  is  despised  and  rejected  and  done  to  death. 
And  all  this  is  the  foil  and  background  of  his  great 
joy.  For  he  has  his  moment  when  to  some  mind,  more 
honest  than  usual  to  its  own  need,  there  comes  a  pre¬ 
sentiment  of  recognition,  and  the  awed  question,  Who 
art  thou,  Lord? — to  which  he  answers,  I  am  he  whom 
thou  persecutest. 

No  assertion  could  be  more  empty  than  the  Christian 
saying  that  God  is  love,  if  that  love  were  simply  a 
subjective  disposition  on  the  part  of  a  being  forever 
inactive  and  unseen.  If  God  exists  as  a  good-will,  that 
will  must  do  its  work  in  the  world  of  time  and  event 
as  a  will  to  power  not  wholly  unlike  our  own,  and  so 
coming  to  itself,  as  we  must,  through  the  saving  of 
others.  Christianity  is  right  in  holding  that  such  a 
God,  if  he  exists,  must  somehow  appear  in  the  temporal 
order.  And  it  seems  to  me  that  it  is  also  right  in  say¬ 
ing  that  he  must  suffer;  and  not  alone  with  us  (as  any 
god  must  who  knows  what  is  going  on)  but  also  for  us, 
and  at  our  hands .  For  the  ‘  hardening  of  our  hearts/ 
i.e.,  their  alienation  from  reality,  due  to  our  preoccupa¬ 
tion  with  our  own  suffering,  could  hardly  be  overcome 
except  by  seeing  that  in  the  actual  mesh  of  our  own 
experience  the  brunt  of  our  selfishness  has  fallen  upon 
him ,  and  that  he,  in  this  sense,  bears  our  sin  in  his 
own  body.  It  is  such  a  god,  active  in  history  and  suffer¬ 
ing  there,  that  Christianity  declares  as  the  most  im¬ 
portant  fact  about  the  world  we  live  in. 

To  believe  in  such  a  god  would  give  history  a  mean¬ 
ing  over  and  above  any  visible  or  experimental  mean¬ 
ing  it  may  have :  it  would  have  to  be  read  as  the  drama 


424 


CHRISTIANITY 


of  God’s  life,  his  making  and  remaking  of  men.  His 
concern  for  them  would  have  to  he  thought  as  literal 
and  individual  as  they  themselves  are  literal  and  indi¬ 
vidual.  Love,  as  Royce  has  said,  individuates  its  object; 
but  it  is  equally  true  that  it  individuates  its  subject: 
it  takes  an  individual  to  be  a  lover.  And  every  human 
being,  if  these  things  are  true,  must  be  able  to  discover 
as  the  sense  of  his  entire  experience  a  direct  address 
of  the  absolute  being  to  him,  as  if  the  world  were  made 
for  him  alone.  The  universe  becomes  suddenly,  not  ego¬ 
centric,  but  multi-centric.  Just  as  in  infinite  space  the 
center  of  reference  may  be  assumed  in  any  point;  so 
in  history,  as  Christianity  must  see  it,  the  center  of  the 
universe  is  everywhere  that  the  divine  interest  finds 
a  person.  “  Whoever  you  are,  now  I  place  my  hand 
upon  you  that  you  be  my  poem”:  this  is  the  point  of 
tangency  between  Whitman’s  semi-pagan  genius  and 
the  spirit  of  Christian  history.  Without  excluding  a 
movement  in  history  toward  a  goal  or  toward  many 
goals,  there  is  in  this  picture  no  meager  one-way  tele¬ 
ology,  but  loss  and  supreme  attainment  are  every¬ 
where.  It  is  not  unlike  the  world  of  the  child,  who  has 
not  yet  learned  to  doubt  that  all  things  exist  for  his 
sake ;  and  to  the  end  it  requires  something  of  the  spirit 
of  a  child  to  enter  the  world  of  Christianity.  The  strain 
on  belief  is  at  a  maximum;  and  this  religion  does 
nothing  to  relieve  it. 

Judicious  heads,  having  seen  much  of  the  world’s 
actual  indifference,  might  incline  to  ease  the  burden  of 
so  much  faith  by  reducing  God’s  alleged  love  to  a 
general  disposition,  a  kindly  wish  and  effort  toward 


THE  DIVINE  AGGRESSION 


425 


a  far-off  good  available  to  the  ultimate  denizens  of 
time.  A  finite  or  mildly  benevolent  power,  struggling 
as  a  sort  of  elan  of  life  against  the  perpetual  resist¬ 
ance  of  matter,  and  like  a  cosmic  council  of  war  so  lost 
in  vast  designs  that  the  private  fades  before  its  view 
into  the  mass,  seems  much  more  probable  to  those 
whose  metaphysics  is  a  distillation  of  the  mixed 
essences  of  experience.  But  probability  has  no  place 
in  metaphysics;  and  the  probable  God  is  a  very  un¬ 
likely  God,  in  the  sense  that  he  solves  no  problems. 
Whether  the  world  we  live  in  is  or  is  not  the  world  of 
Christianity  is  a  question  of  fact. 


CHAPTER  XL VII 


THE  LAST  FACT 

1  DOUBT  whether  philosophy  can  affirm  the  exist¬ 
ence  of  this  fact.  It  can  show  that  if  such  a  fact 
were  extant  onr  dilemma  would  be  solved.  It  can  show, 
further,  that  certain  characters  of  the  world  are  in 
harmony  with  such  a  fact.  Thus,  the  dialectic  of  experi¬ 
ence,  as  we  look  back  upon  it,  may  be  understood  as  a 
part  of  the  strategy  of  “The  Hound  of  Heaven.”  The 
world  is  so  devised  that  “All  things  betray  thee,  who 
betrayest  me ’  ’ :  the  will,  apparently  driven  by  dissatis¬ 
faction  in  its  own  false  definitions  of  good,  may  to  a 
deeper  knowledge  be  seen  as  driven  by  the  wind  of  a 
god’s  desire.  And  as  for  all  the  irregularly  distributed 
individual  deprivation,  it  is  at  least  conceivable  that  it 
is  part  of  the  individual  appeal  of  that  same  god : 

All  which  I  took  from  thee,  I  did  but  take 
Not  for  thy  harms,  but  just  that  thou 
Mightst  seek  it  in  my  arms.  .  .  . 

I  am  he  whom  thou  seekest. 

But  the  power  of  so  understanding  the  dialectic,  or 
so  interpreting  evil,  is  retrospective.  The  force  which 
could  lift  the  mind  into  a  position  from  which  this 
reading  seems  the  truth  does  not  lie  in  the  dialectic 
itself.  It  must  come  as  a  positive  datum,  something 


THE  LAST  FACT 


427 


itself  personally  experienced  or  ‘  revealed.  ’  It  is  here 
that  religion  takes  the  issne  ont  of  the  hands  of 
philosophy. 

For  religion  in  its  historical  forms  is  empirical:  it 
appeals  to  the  realistic  temper:  it  deals  with  facts. 
Its  function  is  not  to  prove  God  but  to  announce  God. 
For  this  reason,  its  doctrine  is  stated  as  dogma ;  and 
the  fundamental  dogma  of  religion  is  Ecce  Deus,  Be¬ 
hold,  This  is  God.  Such  a  dogma  certainly  appeals  to 
the  reason  of  every  man,  for  it  can  mean  nothing  to 
any  one  except  in  so  far  as  he  is  capable  of  under¬ 
standing  his  own  needs ;  but  beyond  that,  it  appeals  to 
his  power  to  recognize  what  he  needs  in  what  is  real. 
Recognition  is  an  act  of  the  mind  which  thought  can 
lead  up  to,  but  never  quite  enforce.  Hence  religion  calls 
upon  every  man  for  an  individual  and  ultimate  “I  be¬ 
lieve/  ’  which  means,  “I  recognize  this  to  be  the  fact,” 
or,  more  simply,  ‘  ‘  I  see.  * ’ 


In  the  last  resort,  it  is  by  his  own  vision  that  every 
man  must  live : — when  we  call  a  man  an  individual,  we 
are  thinking  of  the  solitude  of  his  ultimate  relation  to 
reality.  He  must  live  by  what  he,  for  himself,  can 
recognize ;  and  his  power  of  recognizing  is  an  integral 
part  of  his  instinctive  equipment. 

For  as  hunger  may  be  trusted,  for  the  most  part,  to 
recognize  what  will  serve  as  food,  so  all  instinct  may 
be  trusted  to  recognize  what  it  needs  in  the  world,  if 
what  it  needs  is  there.  Animal  instinct  will  recognize 


428 


CHRISTIANITY 


its  needed  physical  facts,  human  instinct  its  needed 
physical  and  metaphysical  facts, — if  they  exist. 


Conversely,  whatever  beliefs,  or  metaphysical  find¬ 
ings,  men  have  lived  by  are  to  some  extent  corroborated 
(certainly  not  by  ‘ general  consent/  but)  by  the  cir¬ 
cumstance  that  they  have  formed  part  of  the  vital  cir¬ 
cuit  of  human  instinct,  have  been  the  feeders  and 
shapers  of  instinct.  The  more  durable  of  these  beliefs 
are  not  wholly  illusory :  “Taction  ne  saurait  se  mouvoir 
dans  Virreel.” 

But  in  the  composition  of  these  working  beliefs, 
fiction  and  mere  hopefulness  may  mingle  with  positive 
metaphysical  finding  in  unknown  proportion.  The  mys¬ 
tic  in  man,  the  original  seer  of  ultimate  things,  learns 
but  slowly  to  discriminate  between  his  perceptions  and 
his  dreams.  The  critic  in  man,  the  judgment  based  on 
experience  and  self-conscious  reason,  rises  but  slowly 
to  the  task  of  releasing  what  is  significant  and  true  in 
dogma  from  what  is  irrelevant  and  false, — condemn¬ 
ing  sometimes  too  little,  quite  as  frequently  too  much. 

• 

•  • 

The  individual,  then,  who  realizes  that  his  meta¬ 
physical  questions  are  questions  of  life  and  death  for 
instinct  and  will,  can  give  no  exclusive  credence  either 
to  the  mystic  in  himself  or  to  the  critic ;  he  will  require 
them  to  act  in  co-operation.  He  will  be  satisfied  neither 
with  pragmatic  beliefs,  chosen  for  their  promise  of 


THE  LAST  FACT 


429 


satisfaction  (ghosts  of  human  desires  offered  as  sub¬ 
stantial  food  to  these  same  desires),  nor  with  true  gen¬ 
eral  ideas  (entities  which  taken  alone  make  no  differ¬ 
ence  and  do  no  work) . 

He  will  realize  that  his  instinctive  appetite  for  knowl¬ 
edge  is  an  honorable  appetite.  It  is  in  the  existing  world 
that  instinct  must  grow  and  work  out  its  meaning ;  and 
the  existing  world  is  distinguishable  both  from  prag¬ 
matic  dreams  and  from  true  general  ideas :  it  is  a  union 
of  general  ideas  with  matter  of  fact  in  a  living  fabric 
of  historical  movement  and  change.  It  is  to  this  living 
mesh  that  mystic  and  critic  must  direct  their  vision. 
Whatever  is  real  and  significant  for  instinct  must  in 
some  way  exist  in  the  active  surface  of  history, — some 
of  it  no  doubt  built  into  history  at  various  points  of 
the  working  edge  of  time  in  such  wise  that  we  could 
not  now  unbuild  it  if  we  would. 

As  an  inseparable  part  of  the  question,  What  sort  of 
world  is  it  that  we  live  in!  he  will  thus  be  driven  to 
enquire,  What  sort  of  world  have  we  been  living  in 9 
What  have  been  the  metaphysical  foundations,  real  or 
supposed  real,  for  those  qualities,  those  instinct-shapes, 
which  characterize  our  present  human  type  ? 


The  qualities  which  have  made  and  are  making  our 
contemporary  civilization  are  not  qualities  of  intellect 
more  than  qualities  of  character  :  they  are  such  quali¬ 
ties  as  integrity,  reliability,  legality,  practical  force, 
love  of  liberty.  At  the  root  of  them  is  a  capacity  for 


430 


CHRISTIANITY 


facing  and  absorbing  the  increasing  pain  which  is  in¬ 
cident  to  increasing  contact  with  objective  reality.  To 
surrender  ourselves  without  flinching  to  the  findings 
of  natural  science  is  something  we  have  had  to  learn 
by  painfully  slow  degrees;  to  accept  the  unflattering 
position  of  man  in  the  Copemican  world  and  in  the 
evolutionary  scheme ;  to  regard  and  burrow  deeper  into 
the  human  mind  as  an  object  in  nature;  to  submit  to 
the  hardship  involved  in  making  a  social  order  on  the 
principle  of  a  thoroughly  objective  impersonal  justice, 
— all  this  has  required  the  ‘  virtue 9  of  Rome  together 
with  a  sympathy  and  sensitiveness  to  what  is  not-our- 
selves  that  has  not  come  from  Rome.  Our  civilization 
is  one  which  has  once  for  all  put  away  vested  interest 
in  illusions,  and  has  dared  to  stand  naked  before  the 
last  facts  so  far  as  it  could  find  them.  In  this  there  is 
much  of  the  plain  ‘ grit’  such  as  Joseph  Conrad  loves 
to  celebrate :  but  grit  is  not  necessarily  attentive  to  the 
weak,  the  incipent,  the  minute,  the  growing, — and  it  is 
here  that  our  peculiar  strength  and  promise  lies.  It  is 
a  union  of  strength  and  tenderness  which  has  brought 
us  to  the  best  we  have  so  far  found. 

The  strength  that  we  have  is  not  the  strength  of 
physical  instinct;  nor  has  it  ever  been  for  mankind 
‘pure’  grit.  In  former  times,  with  the  zest  of  original 
pugnacity  and  the  conviction  of  mounting  passion,  men 
could  throw  themselves  without  reserve  into  the  issues 
of  battle ;  and  battle  became  for  them  a  quasi-religious 
orgy  in  which  the  spirit  of  the  fathers  and  of  the  tribe 
drew  near  almost  to  touching  and  filled  the  frame  with 
unwonted  power.  Grit  and  enthusiasm  went  together. 


THE  LAST  FACT 


431 


And  now  without  the  aid  of  primitive  feeling  or  hope 
of  individual  glory  men  of  more  sensitive  mould  go 
simply  to  a  mill  of  war  whose  portent  of  possible  suffer¬ 
ing  is  incomparably  more  intense.  What  do  these  men 
stand  on?  Not  on  any  consciousness  of  the  heroic,  but 
on  the  plain  sense  of  what  is  necessary ;  and  they  pro¬ 
fess  thereby  a  faith  of  some  kind  that  facing  what  is 
necessary  is  better  than  muffling  the  head  in  a  lying 
dream.  Effectively  and  actually  men  care  more  for 
reality  than  ever  before,  and  behind  that  confidence  lies 
some  kind  of  creed,  or  let  me  say,  some  kind  of  contact 
with  the  spirit  of  the  world. 

Neither  is  the  tenderness  we  have  the  tenderness  of 
physical  instinct.  We  tend,  we  teach,  we  legislate,  we 
try  our  hand  at  justice  and  reform.  We  do  this  not  from 
any  pure  outflow  of  kindness :  we  do  it  with  a  certain 
joy  of  power  which  is  at  the  same  time  fully  awake  to 
the  defect  of  our  performance.  The  parent  who  deals 
with  his  son  and  the  publicist  whose  thought  becomes 
the  rule  for  millions  are  well  aware  in  these  days  of 
the  human  equation  in  their  judgments.  We  are  demo¬ 
cratic  :  no  authorities  among  us  dare  set  up  as  absolute. 
They  live,  we  all  live,  at  the  requirement  of  the  move¬ 
ment  of  things  over  a  gap  unbridged  by  our  own  com¬ 
petence.  Earlier  men  acted  thus  instinctively,  with  the 
confident  affection  and  protectiveness  of  the  animal 
parent  or  leader.  But  if  we  act  thus  it  is  because,  while 
self-doubts  emerge  and  continue  to  emerge,  they  have 
seemed  to  receive  from  the  world  we  live  in  assurances 
that  satisfy,  as  if  at  least  the  kindlier  enterprises  of 
living  were,  or  might  be,  a  partnership  with  power  more 


432 


CHRISTIANITY 


intimately  attuned  than  our  own  to  the  inner  facts  of 
history,  capable  of  reaching  its  goal  in  the  midst  of  our 
inadequacies. 


If  the  spirit  of  the  world  is  actually  such  as  to  justify 
to  the  growingly  self-conscious  being  this  kind  of  con¬ 
fidence  and  sensitiveness,  we  should  doubtless,  as  with 
all  pervasive  utilities,  better  recognize  the  ingredient 
which  does  this  work  if  it  were  experimentally  with¬ 
drawn. 

And  as  it  happens,  such  aid  to  vision  is  not  wholly 
lacking  at  this  moment.  A  calamity  having  the  force 
of  a  ghastly  experiment  occurs,  vivisection  of  this 
vaunted  Western  life,  with  all  its  sources,  material  and 
otherwise,  putting  a  harsh  end  to  all  mere  momentums 
of  belief,  to  all  complacencies,  sanctimonies,  and  in¬ 
fallible  prescriptions,  to  all  sleepy  tugging  at  dry  paps. 
How  much  can  you  do  without  and  still  live ? — this 
searching  experimental  question  war  presses  home  to 
soul  and  body,  abolishing  stroke  by  stroke  gross  quan¬ 
tities  of  wealth,  gross  quantities  also  of  life,  beauty, 
happiness,  personal  and  public.  But  with  all  these  aboli¬ 
tions  spreads  another, — the  swift  and  easy  abolition 
of  that  supposed  ‘sanctity  of  human  life y  together  with 
other  sanctities  formerly  potent :  this,  too,  we  are  called 
upon  to  do  without  if  we  can,  or  perhaps  rather  to  see 
it  for  what  it  was, — a  glamour  of  some  sort,  a  conspir¬ 
acy  to  hold  high  the  level  of  self-esteem,  mutual  palaver 
of  polite  society,  valid  enough  so  long  as  no  serious 


THE  LAST  FACT 


433 


business  is  on,  no  occasion  for  telling  one  another  cold 
truth. 

Cold  truth  being  now  in  order,  we  measure  humanity 
in  the  mass  as  so  much  force,  resistance,  morale ;  feed 
it  into  the  hopper  by  regiments,  brigades.  A  comrade, 
a  friend,  changes  in  an  instant  into  debris,  so  much 
wreckage  to  be  cleared  away.  Once  more  we  see  man 
in  terms  of  his  yield :  er  ist  was  er  isst;  and  that  will  of 
his,  that  morale  and  mentality,  is  a  bit  of  equipment, 
an  appareil,  working  best  when  nearest  the  ground,  fit 
for  short  flights,  better  avoiding  long  ones  and  cer¬ 
tainly  all  infinite  flights.  ‘Infinite  value’!  Infinite 
conceit ! 

When  this  sentiment  about  human  value  is  thus  un- 
sentimentally  challenged,  we  perceive  that  it  has  had 
much  to  do  with  sustaining  those  qualities  of  confidence 
and  tenderness  which  we  thought  distinctive  of  our 
civilization.  It  is  not  itself  a  metaphysical  belief,  but 
a  by-product  of  such  a  belief,  doubtless  the  belief  of 
which  we  are  in  search,  and  whose  character  we  may 
now  dimly  make  out. 


There  is  an  instinct  in  us  as  yet  unnamed  by  psychol- 
ogy,  perhaps  the  deepest  instinct  of  all :  it  is  the  total 
infantile  response  to  the  maternal  impulse.  This  in¬ 
stinct  knows  what  kind  of  metaphysic  it  needs,  namely, 
a  world  maternal  not  in  part  only,  but  altogether.  What 
has  happened,  then,  is  obvious,  is  it  not!  That  benevo¬ 
lent  god  with  a  trillion  equally  dear  children,  that  pic- 


434 


CHRISTIANITY 


ture  of  world-familydom,  or  of  world-shepherdhood, 
that  impossible  Absolute  engaged  in  countless  simul¬ 
taneous  ‘  seeking  and  saving ’  enterprises, — all  of  this  is 
but  the  poetry  of  childhood,  valid  there  in  fact,  and 
holding  over  into  the  more  sheltered  corners  of  ma¬ 
ture  hopefulness,  lingering  to  comfort  minds  that 
insist  on  being  comforted,  minds  incapable  of  genuine 
maturity, — or  perhaps  even  to  protect  certain  subjec¬ 
tivities  and  prides,  personal,  racial,  genealogical,  rem¬ 
nants  of  stale  human  provinciality  liking  to  believe  it¬ 
self  the  chosen  strain.  This  persistent  metaphysics  of 
the  motherhood  of  history  or  grandmotherliness  of 
history, — is  it  not  the  most  palpable  of  pragmatic  fic¬ 
tions,  or  instinct-beliefs!  And  if  so,  it  can  no  longer 
serve  us,  having  been  found  out. 

•  • 

But  what  becomes,  then,  of  these  contemporary 
qualities  of  justified  strength  and  tenderness!  They  do 
not  disappear;  they  are  merely  replaced  by  more  ele¬ 
mental  editions  of  themselves,  suited  rather  to  a  world 
aloof,  preoccupied,  or  indifferent  than  to  a  parental 
world. 

If  ‘justified  confidence’  is  unavailable,  there  is  al¬ 
ways  a  well  of  instinctive  confidence  to  fall  back  upon, 
the  simplest,  least-borrowed  thing  in  human  nature, 
least  needing  to  be  justified, — the  now  admittedly  pure 
grit  of  man  at  bay  in  a  world  neither  his  own  nor  any¬ 
one ’s;  confidence  original,  titanic,  defiant;  confidence 
ueberhaupt.  There  is  an  attitude  needing  no  meta- 


THE  LAST  FACT 


435 


physics,  an  attitude,  well  so-called,  which  few  are  in¬ 
capable  of  striking  if  necessary.  We  can  always  act 
as  if  men,  or  some  men,  were  worth  while,  and  had 
rights,  ourselves  included.  For  the  human  life  authen¬ 
tically  valued  by  an  absolute  valuer,  substitute  the  in¬ 
stinctive  self-valuation  of  the  human  animal,  particu¬ 
larly  the  masculine  animal ;  and  for  the  deference  due 
to  beings  objectively  worthy  of  reverence,  substitute 
the  warmth  of  a  maternal  sympathy  spreading  from 
the  center  outward  as  the  vital  economy  permits.  Give 
these  well-founded  sentiments  an  artificial  extension  by 
the  device  called  the  State ;  so  that  a  degree  of  parent¬ 
hood  enters  into  an  entire  community  in  its  relations 
to  its  own  members, — competing  and  warring  from 
time  to  time  with  similar  sentiments  of  parenthood  on 
the  part  of  other  communities ;  and  as  there  is  no  real 
parent,  parenthood  may  be  said  to  exist  just  so  far  as 
it  can  forcibly  make  itself  valid  in  the  world. 

This  is  the  alternative  into  which  we  may  seem  driven 
by  the  disillusionments,  the  down-crashing  of  all  cur¬ 
rent  sentiments,  in  this  day  of  reckoning.  And  in  that 
case  history,  having  reached  its  summit,  turns  down¬ 
ward. 


Let  it  be  clearly  understood  that  this  reversal  of 
direction  is  involved  in  the  proposed  change.  For 
animal  confidence  can  no  longer  sustain  a  fully  human 
effort  as  we  have  come  to  understand  it,  not  even  a 
human  war. 


436 


CHRISTIANITY 


The  flame  of  war  can  leap  into  life  among  common 
people  only  because  of  the  presence  there  of  a  meta¬ 
physical  outlook  that  seems  to  make  a  number  of  things, 
including  human  life,  objectively  valuable  and  ‘  sacred/ 
If  the  aims  of  war,  or  the  activities  of  war,  contradict 
this  belief ;  or  if  self-consciousness  in  the  midst  of  the 
carnage  is  driven  to  press  its  questions,  Do  I  matter! 
Does  any  deed  or  thought  of  mine  matter!  Does  any 
other  deed  or  thought  or  interest  or  life  matter!  Does 
the  ‘  cause  ’  itself  finally  matter,  or  the  nation  and  all 
its  wars,  holy  or  unholy! — the  spirit  inevitably  seeps 
out  of  the  fighting.  It  is  possible  for  fighting  to  under¬ 
mine  one ’s  sense  of  the  only  things  worth  fighting  for. 

And  what  is  true  of  war  is  true  to  an  even  greater 
degree  of  the  long  upbuilding  effort  of  the  creative 
arts.  If  ‘progress’  must  bring  disillusionment  and  the 
harsh  daylight  of  a  denying  realism,  progress  is  des¬ 
tined  to  devour  its  own  children. 

Values,  human  values,  can  survive  only  if,  reaching 
out  toward  a  metaphysical  condition  which  their  dream- 
shapes  foreshadow,  they  find  it.  They  need  reality  to 
climb  on;  they  need  a  reality  they  can  climb  on.  They 
want  an  independent  source  of  standards,  a  mooring 
outside  of  nature,  such  as  we  surmised  at  the  begin¬ 
ning  of  our  study.  Their  own  poussee  vitale  droops, 
half -grown,  unless  it  meets  an  equivalent  attrait  vital 
streaming  into  its  environment  from  some  pole  outside 
itself. 

•  • 

And  thus  this  experiment,  this  world-surgery,  begins 


THE  LAST  FACT 


437 


to  make  so  •  muck  unmistakable :  That  what  human 
nature  has  been  responding  to  is  not  its  own  instinctive 
self-esteem,  codified  in  institutions,  or  uncodified,  but 
a  valuation  believed  real  and  objective,  supposedly 
hailing  from  beyond  nature,  authoritatively  requiring 
of  man  that  self -honor  and  that  honor  of  his  kind  which 
his  own  impulse  achieves  but  fitfully  and  from  the 
center  outward. 

And  this  valuation,  be  it  noted,  has  appeared  to  him 
not  as  a  proclaimed  theorem  regarding  human  value 
in  the  abstract,  but  as  actual  valuedness ,  i.e.,  valuation 
acted  upon  in  multitudes  of  deeds,  struggles  for  human 
rights  and  guarantees  thereof,  sacrifices  and  martyr¬ 
doms  without  number;  in  all  of  which  an  authentic 
divine  will  and  activity  were  supposed  discernible  by 
those  having  eyes  to  see.  To  many  of  these  human 
doers  their  own  deeds  appeared  to  be  utterances  not 
alone  of  their  private  wills  but  also  of  the  ultimate 
will  of  the  world.  In  brief,  we  of  this  age  have  been 
living  on  an  aggressive  valuation,  built  into  history, 
and  supposed  whether  wisely  or  not  to  transmit  an 
absolute  judgment. 


And  not  strangely,  mankind  seems  to  have  counted 
most  on  the  costliest  of  such  deeds,  the  most  deliber¬ 
ately  defiant  of  the  natural  appearance.  As  at  this 
moment,  so  it  has  always  been:  it  is  the  negation  by 
the  brute  forces  of  the  world,  the  negation  and  con¬ 
tempt  of  what  humanity  has  held  most  precious,  which 
has  split  opinion  into  its  concealed  extremes. 


438 


CHRISTIANITY 


For  it  is  just  such  negation  which  creates  the  oppor¬ 
tunity  for  deeds  most  audaciously  experimental,  deeds 
of  self-immolation  of  which  the  onlooker  must  say 
that  they  embody  either  the  wisdom  of  the  gods,  or 
else  infra-human  unwisdom.  It  is  upon  the  great  experi¬ 
mental  sacrifices  of  history  that  men  have  climbed  to 
their  positive  metaphysical  insights;  or  to  what  they 
have  taken  to  be  such,  be  it  only  their  passionate  asser¬ 
tions  that  such  sacrifices,  such  blottings  out  of  man’s 
evident  best,  cannot  have  been  folly,  and  shall  not  have 
been  vain. 


It  is  not  for  us,  here,  to  assert  or  deny,  either  pas¬ 
sionately  or  otherwise ;  but  as  students  of  human  nature 
and  its  destiny  to  state  deliberately  the  connections 
of  cause  and  consequence,  and  face  our  alternatives. 
Our  metaphysical  finding,  our  last  fact,  may  be  such  as 
to  release  and  encourage  the  growth  of  instinctive 
meaning,  warming  out  its  inner  logic  and  wider  link¬ 
ages;  it  may  be  (as  with  Schopenhauer)  such  as  to 
wither  and  repel  it ;  it  may  be  no  finding  at  all,  but  an 
enigmatic  silence  of  a  non-committal  world  which 
denies  only  by  refusing  to  affirm.  In  no  case  is  it  in¬ 
different. 

Absence  of  belief  that  the  world  as  a  whole  has  an 
active  individual  concern  for  the  creatures  it  has  pro¬ 
duced  need  neither  destroy  happiness  nor  the  morality 
of  compassion.  Life  would  always  be  worth  living  and 
worth  living  well,  so  long  as  free  from  the  major  tor- 


THE  LAST  FACT 


439 


ments.  Instinct  has  its  satisfactions  in  an  nninterpreted 
or  partly  interpreted  condition:  it  will  reach  some 
accommodation  to  the  world  that  is.  Nothing  would 
necessarily  he  destroyed  or  lost  from  the  good  life 
which  some  at  least  of  the  human  race  now  know  and 
many  hope  for, — nothing  except  the  higher  reaches  of 
curiosity  and  sympathy,  and  the  wisdom  of  develop¬ 
ing  them.  It  is  only  the  enthusiasts  for  a  far-off  good, 
for  an  endlessly  progressive  humanity,  for  a  profound 
and  logical  love  of  life,  that  would  be  cut  off ;  it  is  only 
the  martyrs  that  have  played  the  fool;  only  to  saints 
and  sages  the  world  has  lied. 


The  End 


APPENDIX  I 


THE  DILEMMA  IN  THE  CONCEPTION  OP  INSTINCT, 
AS  APPLIED  TO  HUMAN  PSYCHOLOGY1 

1.  The  common  use  of  the  term  instinct  is  not  em¬ 
barrassed  by  the  fact  that  its  meaning  is  hybrid.  It 
means  a  mode  of  behavior  and  it  means  a  mode  of  in¬ 
terest;  and  for  ordinary  purposes  the  mixture  of  physi¬ 
cal  ingredients  with  mental  ingredients  makes  no 
trouble  and  requires  no  explanation. 

But  when  a  technical  definition  is  sought  mixtures 
are  no  longer  satisfactory ;  a  concept  must  have  a  fix- 
able  character,  not  a  dual  personality.  Yet  the  effort  to 
reach  a  “ clear  and  distinct  idea”  of  instinct  commonly 
results  in  a  dilemma.  When  the  definition  does  justice 
to  all  that  instinct  means  in  physical  terms,  it  fails  to 
fit  what  instinct  means  in  mental  terms ;  and  vice  versa. 
When  either  side  is  securely  nailed  down,  the  other 
warps  up  and  refuses  to  fall  into  the  plane.  The  definer 
is  tempted  to  ignore  one  or  the  other  aspect  of  the  con¬ 
ception  ;  but  this  way  of  escape  cannot  be  successful  in 
human  psychology,  for  reasons  hereafter  to  be  stated. 

2.  If  the  meaning  of  a  conception  could  be  deter¬ 
mined  by  its  history,  there  would  be  little  doubt  about 
the  definition  of  instinct.  For  the  native  haunts  of  the 
idea  of  instinct  are  in  behavior,  animal  behavior.  The 
epoch  is  not  far  past  when  the  animals  had  all  the  in- 

i  Reprinted  (with  slight  changes)  from  The  Journal  of  Abnormal 
Psychology  and  Social  Psychology,  June-September,  1921. 


442 


APPENDIX  I 


stincts,  and  had  nothing  else  to  go  by,  while  man  had  all 
the  reason,  and  had  no  instincts  to  help  his  reason  ont. 
This  is  far  from  being  the  case  to-day ;  but  it  remains 
true  that  the  conception  of  instinct  is  more  at  home  in 
the  place  of  its  birth  than  elsewhere.  It  is  quite  possible 
to  give  a  definition  of  instinct  which  takes  care  of  all 
the  items  usually  dubbed  instinctive  in  animal  behavior 
and  excludes  the  rest.  The  following  composite  photo¬ 
graph  of  various  such  definitions  shows  their  tendency 
to  converge : 

An  instinct  is  an  innate  behavior  pattern,  common  to 
all  members  of  a  species  or  of  a  sex  of  a  species,  leading 
from  a  situation  marked  by  a  specific  signal  or  ‘  stimu¬ 
lus J  through  a  fairly  regular  and  more  or  less  complex 
series  of  operations  to  an  end  favorable  to  the  survival 
of  the  individual  or  of  the  species.  Its  most  useful 
marks  or  criteria  are  adaptiveness,  and  untaught  skill 
in  the  use  of  specific  organs. 

3.  If,  however,  we  try  to  approach  a  definition  of 
instinct  from  the  side  of  our  own  experience,  we  find 
it  awkward.  Try  to  enumerate  the  items  of  your  own 
stream  of  consciousness  that  you  regard  as  instinctive, 
and  the  reason  for  this  will  become  clear. 

Unless  we  are  exceptionally  instructed  or  sophisti¬ 
cated  individuals,  we  do  not  label  our  instincts  by  that 
name  while  we  are  using  them.  When  we  are  angry,  it 
seems  to  us  the  reverse  of  an  irrational  course  of  con¬ 
duct  :  it  seems  rather  the  reaction  of  reason  itself  to  the 
irrational  behavior  of  others, — we  know  nothing  of  an 
4  instinct  of  pugnacity ’  in  such  a  moment.  Or  if  we  find 
ourselves  disinclined  to  take  a  high  dive  while  social  im- 


DILEMMA  IN  THE  CONCEPTION  OF  INSTINCT  443 

pulses  favor  the  performance  and  reason  reassures,  we 
as  a  rule  make  no  conscious  avowal,  even  to  ourselves, 
of  an  ‘  instinct  ’  of  fear.  The  grounds  for  action  or  in¬ 
action  appear  to  us  objective;  we  rationalize  them:  and 
in  this  process  the  instinctive  factor  is  transmuted,  or 
is  apparent  chiefly  to  others. 

The  salient  mark,  from  our  own  standpoint,  of  those 
events  which  psychology  comes  to  call  instinctive,  is 
simply  interest , — positive  or  negative  interest.  In¬ 
stincts  stand  out  from  the  rest  of  our  mental  life  chiefly 
because  of  their  emotional  accompaniments  and  a  sense 
of  power  or  ease  that  goes  with  the  action.  In  the  ver¬ 
nacular,  the  domain  of  instinct  is  simply  the  domain  of 
the  “things  one  takes  to  naturally,’ ’ — satisfactions 
which  life  discovers  and  which  neither  offer  nor  need 
any  explanation. 

4.  The  recognition  of  instincts  in  ourselves  is  greatly 
aided  by  the  role  played  by  the  non-rational  in  the 
social  context  of  our  lives.  There  are  the  common  in¬ 
terests  which  obviously  help  us  to  understand  one  an¬ 
other  without  elaborate  explanations,  to  work  and  play 
together,  to  build  intricate  social  arrangements  on  safe 
calculations  of  what  human  beings  will  want  and  do, 
and  to  be  amused  at  the  familiar-strange  ways  of  the 
whole  human  tribe. 

It  is  this  quasi-cynical  interest  (characteristic  of  all 
psychology)  which  a  man  takes  first  in  his  fellows  and 
later  in  himself,  that  accounts  for  the  inescapable  at¬ 
tachment  of  the  conception  of  instinct  to  the  mind, 
where  naturally  it  is  a  stranger. 

5.  In  its  use,  in  the  mental  field,  we  have  a  striking 


444 


APPENDIX  I 


instance  of  the  disposition  of  mature  human  self-con¬ 
sciousness  to  make  a  mythology  of  itself,  and  to  till 
itself  full  of  hidden  mechanisms  which  it  conceives  as 
springing  perpetual  surprises  upon  its  unsuspecting 
person.  Mankind  dearly  loves  a  little  machine  which  it 
can  substitute  for  itself  when  it  tries  to  think  about 
itself.  And  if  the  machine  has  trap  doors,  which  conceal 
a  subterranean  chamber  full  of  dynamos  and  secret 
springs,  and  guarded  by  a  jealous,  sycophantish,  and 
otherwise  stagely-villainous  censor  engaged  in  tyranni¬ 
cal  repressions,  the  mythology  acquires  all  the  fascina¬ 
tion  of  a  detective  story. 

If  consciousness  is  the  place  where  appearance  and 
reality  coincide,  everybody  should  be  a  natural  au¬ 
thority  upon  his  own  states  of  mind.  But  no  one  who  has 
taught  any  subject  with  a  strain  of  psychology  in  it 
can  have  failed  to  notice  the  almost  complete  docility 
with  which  most  students  will  accept  doctrines  about 
what  they  are  made  of,  and  their  almost  eager  readi¬ 
ness  to  believe  themselves  full  of  ‘ complexes,’  and  other 
phantasms  of  the  living. 

Now  it  would  be  absurd  to  say  that  these  mechanisms, 
which  evidently  hail  from  the  world  of  physical  be¬ 
havior,  throw  no  light  upon  our  conscious  selves.  Con¬ 
sciousness  has  its  self-luminous  regions;  but  it  is  not 
all  self-luminous :  and  in  those  regions  where  it  admits 
of  light  being  thrown  upon  it,  nothing  else  promises  so 
much  light  as  just  these  curious  machines.  But  it  is 
necessary  to  be  clear  that  all  such  behavioristic  ele¬ 
ments  are  imported , — not  found  in  the  natural  output 
of  introspection, — if  we  would  see  the  nature  of  the 


DILEMMA  IN  THE  CONCEPTION  OF  INSTINCT  445 

difficulty  of  the  conception  of  instinct  on  its  mental 
side. 

6.  This  difficulty  will  become  more  apparent  if  we 
consider  the  importance  of  the  work  which  instinct,  in 
human  psychology,  is  called  upon  to  do. 

When  we  study  instinct  in  animals,  we  are  first  at¬ 
tracted  by  the  amazing  tricks  which  lead  to  results  so 
much  superior  to  most  works  of  conscious  device.  Then 
we  learn  that  instinct  is  engaged  not  primarily  in  doing 
tricks,  hut  in  governing  the  whole  normal  round  of  ani¬ 
mal  life,  its  breeding,  food-getting,  migrating,  etc., — 
broad  categories  which  describe  equally  well  the  natu¬ 
ral  round  of  human  life. 

It  is  at  this  stage  that  we  are  likely  to  import  the 
conception  into  human  psychology ;  for  instinct  in  man 
is  not  of  the  trick- working  order  but  rather  of  the  order 
of  interests  which  govern  the  broad  life-cycle.  And  the 
classic  list  of  human  instincts  as  ‘love,  hunger  and  self- 
defence’  expresses  well  the  meaning  of  the  conception 
at  this  stage. 

In  popular  and  literary  use,  the  conception  will  prob¬ 
ably  adhere  to  this  meaning.  When  Goethe  wanted  to 
express  the  quasi-cynical,  Solomonian  view  of  human 
life  (Solomon,  the  first  psychologist  whose  works  have 
come  down  to  us),  he  did  so  in  the  lines  which  I  will 
venture  to  render  as  follows : 

Whv  all  this  ado  under  the  sun,  this  labor  and  turmoil  of 

4/  * 

men  ? — 

They  are  striving  to  nourish  themselves,  to  bring  children  to 
birth  and  to  nourish  them : — 

No  one  achieves  a  jot  more,  torment  himself  as  he  may. 


446 


APPENDIX  I 


The  whole  sum  of  human  biography  and  history  is 
told  in  terms  of  these  three  great  impulses  or  interests, 
and  on  the  basis  of  introspection,  these  major  interests 
are  simply  there.  An  interest  explains  all  the  actions 
that  men  carry  out  for  its  sake;  it  does  not  explain 
itself.  And  it  may  reasonably  he  held  not  only  that  an 
interest  needs  no  explanation  but  that  it  is  incapable  of 
explanation.  Value  is  the  only  self- explaining  thing  in 
the  world:  and  interest  is  value  conceived  as  present 
to  a  conscious  and  active  being. 

But  when  values  are  referred  to  instincts,  the  con¬ 
ception  of  instinct  seems  to  offer  some  explanation  of 
those  values.  It  implies  that  our  interests  are  not  self- 
explanatory;  that  we  are  not  content  to  take  them 
simply  as  ultimate  facts.  And  it  proposes  to  explain 
them  by  referring  them  to  something  very  different 
from  value,  namely  to  the  behavior-machines  we  were 
speaking  of.  It  is  here  that  the  difficulty  becomes  acute. 

I  am  not  referring  at  present  to  the  fundamental  diffi¬ 
culty  involved  in  the  proposal  to  get  light  on  the  char¬ 
acter  of  an  interest  by  conceiving  it  as  a  mode  of 
motion.  All  explanation  proceeds  by  referring  a  thing 
to  something  else.  And  it  is  especially  evident  that  if 
instinct  is  to  explain  interest,  it  can  do  so  only  on  con¬ 
dition  that  instinct  itself  is  defined  in  non-mental  terms. 
For  if  instinct  were  defined  by  its  conscious  aspect 
alone,  then  to  say  that  the  original  interests  of  human 
life  are  due  to  instincts  would  be  a  circle :  for  instinct, 
as  a  mental  fact,  can  only  be  defined  by  the  facts  of 
interest. 

But  the  difficulty  is  this ;  that  if  we  avoid  the  circle 


DILEMMA  IN  THE  CONCEPTION  OF  INSTINCT  447 

by  defining  interest  in  terms  of  the  behavior  mechan¬ 
isms,  there  is  a  serious  gap  between  those  items  of  con¬ 
duct  which  can  fairly  be  referred  to  the  mechanisms, 
and  that  large  area  of  conduct  which  is  governed  by 
the  major  interests  of  which  we  have  been  speaking. 

7.  In  the  first  place,  the  great  interest-trends  of  hu¬ 
man  life  are  highly  general,  and  the  behavior  mechan¬ 
isms  in  proportion  as  they  are  strictly  conceived  appear 
highly  specific. 

If  you  carefully  limit  the  conception  of  instinct  to 
operations  which  mechanical  conceptions  (with  a  rea¬ 
sonable  margin  of  hope)  allow  you  to  explain,  you 
naturally  begin  with  reflexes,  and  pass  on  to  chain-re¬ 
flexes  and  more  highly  compounded  forms ;  but  you  end 
by  leaving  out  just  those  major  trends  which  make  the 
conception  psychologically  important.  You  provide  ex¬ 
planations  for  movements  of  manipulation,  but  not  for 
curiosity;  for  separate  movements  of  grasping,  masti¬ 
cating,  swallowing,  locomotion,  but  not  for  a  1  food-get¬ 
ting  instinct’;  for  blushing,  sex-play,  copulation,  but 
not  for  courting,  sex-love,  domesticity:  for  grasping, 
reaching,  pulling,  but  not  for  6 construction.’ 

It  is  natural  enough  for  the  stricter  scientific  con¬ 
science  to  seek  relief  from  this  situation  by  roundly 
denying  that  love,  hunger,  self-defence,  construction, 
curiosity,  etc.,  are  instincts  at  all:  asserting  that  the 
only  legitimate  instincts  are  those  units  of  behavior  for 
which  a  definite  stimulus  and  definite  response  can  be 
determined,  while  the  more  general  categories  are  in¬ 
stincts  only  for  literary  men  and  philosophers.  And  this 
is  a  perfectly  reasonable  attitude;  for,  we  repeat,  the 


448 


APPENDIX  I 


concept  of  instinct  is  primarly  a  behavior-concept ;  and 
the  right  to  define  it  lies  with  the  physiologist. 

But  to  accept  this  position  is  to  take  away  the  concep¬ 
tion  from  those  uses  for  which  it  was  brought  into  hu¬ 
man  psychology;  to  restrain  it  from  offering  explana¬ 
tion  for  that  round  of  life  and  its  major  values  for 
which  it  was  first  invoked ; — in  brief,  to  confine  its  use 
in  human  psychology  to  the  comparatively  trivial. 

8.  In  the  second  place,  the  great  interest-trends  are 
doubtful  in  their  identification  and  in  their  boundaries. 
They  were  certain  to  fall  under  scientific  suspicion,  if 
only  because  every  writer  gave  a  different  list,  and  be¬ 
cause  between  the  lists  there  was  enormous  divergence 
in  the  number  of  items.  If  some  mentioned  three,  others 
(as  William  James)  enumerated  between  thirty  and 
forty. 

Is  there,  or  is  there  not,  an  instinct  of  fear,  or  of  imi¬ 
tation,  of  self-preservation,  of  curiosity,  of  construc¬ 
tiveness!  Is  there  an  instinct  for  each  phrenological 
bump!  The  explanatory  promise  of  the  conception  is 
so  alluring  that  writers  are  tempted  to  coin  an  instinct 
for  any  fairly  persistent  trait  of  mankind  which  they 
wish  to  signalize.  There  is  said  to  be  a  moral  instinct, 
an  aesthetic  instinct,  a  religious  instinct,  a  political  in¬ 
stinct,  or  even  (as  one  writer  asserts)  an  Anglo-Ameri¬ 
can  instinct  for  parliamentary  government. 

There  is  no  wonder  that  the  technician  is  deterred 
from  launching  out  on  seas  peopled  by  such  monsters 
as  some  of  these.  And  yet,  if  all  such  traits  are  omitted, 
in  favor  of  the  demonstrably  congenital  stimulus-re¬ 
sponse  arrangements,  the  major  part  of  human  nature 


DILEMMA  IN  THE  CONCEPTION  OF  INSTINCT  449 

remains  untouched.  “The  theory  of  instinct  becomes 
comparatively  trivial  when  they  are  omitted,  yet  it  has 
always  been  muddled  when  they  are  included.  ’ ’2 

The  hard  alternative  would  seem  to  be  that  between 
behavioristic  clarity  with  inadequacy,  and  introspec¬ 
tive  adequacy  with  muddle. 

9.  But  there  are  at  least  two  conceivable  ways  of  bet¬ 
tering  this  alternative. 

In  spite  of  the  disposition  of  the  concept,  when  de¬ 
fined  in  mental  terms,  to  break  away  from  all  scientific 
restraint  and  sobriety,  it  may  still  be  possible  to  intro¬ 
duce  usable  criteria  which  will  limit  the  play  of  pure 
fancy  and  tame  the  concept  to  scientific  uses.  This  is 
the  way  adopted  by  Dr.  William  McDougall. 

Or,  we  may  tie  to  physiological  clarity,  and  try  to 
enlarge  the  mechanical  resources  in  such  wise  as  to 
cover  more  adequately  the  field  of  human  conduct  as 
we  know  it. 

This  second  path,  that  of  contemporary  behaviorism, 
Dr.  McDougall  regards  as  hopeless,  not  alone  because 
the  major  impulses  are  so  far  out  of  the  reach  of 
present  explanatory  devices,  but  because,  in  his  view, 
physiological  explanations  fail  to  account  for  the  very 
simplest  types  of  animal  behavior. 

The  present  status  of  the  question,  then,  might  be 
stated  in  some  such  way  as  this :  Any  student  of  human 
nature  to-day  must  make  up  his  mind, 

a.  Whether  physiology  can  explain  anything  in  be¬ 
havior  ; 


2  P.  86  above. 


450 


APPENDIX  I 


b.  Whether  there  is  reason  to  hope  that  it  may  ex¬ 
plain  everything  in  behavior; 

c.  Whether  the  introspective  account  of  instinct  can 
be  made  fit  for  scientific  use. 

In  following  sections,  I  wish  to  discuss  these  issues, 
beginning  with  an  enquiry  into  the  reasons  which  lead 
Dr.  McDougall  to  think  that  the  physiological  route  has 
no  outlet. 


II 

10.  Dr.  McDougall  finds  two  defects  in  physiological 
theory  of  behavior  which  are  not  accidental  and  remedi¬ 
able,  but  constitutional. 

First,  its  inability  to  account  for  persistence  of  effort 
toward  an  end  with  endless  variability  of  the  means 
employed.  A  machine  may  be  regarded  as  making  to¬ 
ward  an  end;  but  it  makes  for  that  end  either  by  a 
rigidly  fixed  course  of  intermediate  steps,  as  in  case  of 
the  locomotive  on  its  track,  or  else,  as  in  case  of  the 
self-steering  torpedo,  by  a  course  having  a  very  limited 
range  of  variation.  The  visible  criterion  of  conscious 
action,  according  to  William  James,  is  the  pursuit  of 
ends  with  the  choice  of  means ;  and  this  is  a  criterion  of 
conscious  action  only  because,  as  McDougall  believes, 
such  action  cannot  be  mechanically  accounted  for. 

Second,  its  inability  to  account  for  responses  which 
are  responses  to  meanings, — not  to  any  assignable 
sense  stimulus  or  group  of  sense  stimuli.  Wherever  you 
can  discover  a  recurrent  set  of  sense-elements  in  the 
initial  situation,  you  can  believe  in  the  possibility  of 
mechanical  explanation.  But  where,  as  in  the  case  of  the 


DILEMMA  IN  THE  CONCEPTION  OF  INSTINCT  451 

crying  of  a  child,  the  expressive  reaction  may  be  pro¬ 
voked  by  situations  of  a  thousand  sorts  from  physical 
pain  to  the  mere  fancy  of  neglect  or  reproof,  where  you 
can  safely  defy  any  one  to  allege  a  constant  sensation 
or  group  of  sensations  in  these  initial  situations,  in 
brief,  where  the  only  invariable  antecedent  is  a  ‘  mean¬ 
ing,’  the  very  attempt  at  mechanical  explanation  be¬ 
comes  absurd.3 

Let  us  consider  these  two  difficulties  in  turn. 

11.  First,  can  there  be  a  physiological  explanation 
of  the  pursuit  of  ends  with  unlimited  or  very  large  vari¬ 
ability  in  the  choice  of  means  ? 

It  may  be  admitted  at  once  that  the  explanation  of 
instinctive  behavior  by  the  chain-reflex  pattern  has 
definitely  broken  down,  for  all  such  cases.  The  most  ob¬ 
viously  instinctive  behavior,  such  as  nest  building  in 
birds,  is  too  irregular  in  its  progress,  permits  too  many 
interludes  and  divertissements ,  alarums  and  excur¬ 
sions.  A  chain-reflex  should  have  an  invariable  order : 
process  A  should  always  come  before  process  B,  be¬ 
cause  its  conclusion  is  necessary  to  set  process  B  in 
motion.  If  by  accident  process  B  is  set  off  first,  it  will 
never  go  hack  to  A,  but  will  proceed  mechanically  to  C 
and  D.  If,  per  contra,  there  appears  to  be  a  degree  of 
liberty,  so  that  ABC  may  be  performed  as  well  in  the 
order  BAC,  or  even  CBA,  the  chain-reflex  needs  some 
outside  assistance,  such  as  would  be  supplied  by  a 
mental  picture  of  the  whole  result  to  be  achieved. 

Further,  any  chain  is  likely  to  be  interrupted  or  im- 

3  Cf.  Body  and  Mind,  ch.  xix,  esp.  p.  264  f. 


452 


APPENDIX  I 


peded;  in  which  case,  a  proper  chain  has  little  power 
of  substituting  a  new  link  for  the  unworkable  link.  If, 
as  in  most  complex  instinctive  processes,  intermediate 
steps  may  be  carried  out'  in  many  ways,  one  has  to  fancy 
the  chain  endowed  with  a  supervisory  official  capable 
of  perceiving  the  equivalence  of  the  substituted  links 
to  the  original  links  for  the  purpose  of  the  end  in  view . 
Naturally,  an  intelligent  chain  can  explain  intelligent 
action ;  but  in  mechanical  explanations  we  have  always 
to  be  on  guard  against  a  generous  disposition  to  lend 
some  of  our  own  mentality  to  the  machine  for  the  sake 
of  helping  it  over  the  critical  phases  of  its  operation. 

12.  That  type  of  mechanism,  then,  does  certainly  fail 
to  explain  instinct.  And  I  dwell  upon  this  point,  because 
I  believe  that  wherever  we  find  vitalism  to-day,  it  de¬ 
pends  upon  a  criticism  of  physiological  explanations 
which  is  in  principle  essentially  the  same. 

Why,  for  example,  does  Driesch  require  an  entelechy 
to  understand  how  an  embryo  slashed  at  random  can 
develop  into  a  typical  adult?  Is  it  not  because,  being 
forced  to  work  with  different  means,  it  yet  arrives  at 
the  same  end? 

Why  does  Bergson,  thinking  of  organic  evolution, 
appeal  for  explanation  to  a  vital  principle?  Is  it  not 
because  independent  series  of  organic  forms,  having 
different  beginnings  and  different  intermediaries,  nev¬ 
ertheless  converge  to  similar  results?  In  the  processes 
which  eventuate  in  the  eye  of  the  pecten  and  the  eye 
of  the  vertebrate,  Bergson  can  only  see  a  single  experi¬ 
mental  impulse  operating  with  widely  variant  means. 

In  a  word,  in  all  these  cases  it  is  guidance  that  re- 


DILEMMA  IN  THE  CONCEPTION  OF  INSTINCT  453 

quires  explanation  and  it  is  precisely  guidance  which 
mechanical  agencies  are  judged  incapable  of  giving. 

13.  But  if  the  mechanical  explanation  of  guidance 
has  its  difficulties,  it  will  not  do  to  assume  that  the  vital- 
istic  explanation  is  free  from  them. 

Any  principle  of  explanation  which  refers  physical 
conduct  to  an  entity  of  mental  order  seems  to  save  the 
biological  postulate  that  all  organs  (and  hence  con¬ 
sciousness)  must  be  of  some  use,  but  it  does  so  at  the 
expense  of  the  postulate  that  all  physical  events  have 
physical  explanations. 

If  one  were  forced  to  choose  in  this  lamentable  way 
between  postulates  of  equal  dignity,  one  choice  might 
be  as  defensible  as  the  other.  But  it  is  more  than  doubt¬ 
ful  whether  vitalism,  in  sacrificing  one  principle,  ac¬ 
tually  saves  the  other. 

For  if  consciousness  is  to  be  of  any  use  at  all  in 
carrying  on  life,  it  cannot  be  limited  to  those  residues 
of  conduct  which  mechanics  at  any  time  threatens  to 
leave  unexplained.  Consciousness  must  explain  all  of 
conscious  behavior  or  none.  The  only  principle  that  ac¬ 
cords  in  the  least  with  introspection  is  this :  that  what¬ 
ever  my  body  as  a  whole  does,  I  do , — not  a  fraction  of 
it,  but  the  whole  of  it.  We  cannot  separate  out  the  ‘  guid¬ 
ance’  from  the  rest  of  behavior  in  that  way.  If  I  go 
down  to  breakfast,  that  event  is  not  to  be  described  as 
a  process  carried  out  by  certain  hunger-mechanisms 
inciting  certain  locomotor  mechanisms,  while  I,  the  con¬ 
scious  self,  simply  steer  the  event  at  the  turns  of  the 
stairs  and  in  the  unexpected  encounters  with  other  liv- 


454 


APPENDIX  I 


ing  entities.  It  will  not  do  to  bring  in  consciousness  to 
account  for  remainders. 

Putting  this  principle  into  positive  form,  it  means 
that  if  consciousness  has  any  explaining  power  at  all 
its  scope  includes  that  of  mechanism:  whatever  mecha¬ 
nism  does  consciousness  may  do  also, — so  that  no 
extension  of  the  field  of  mechanical  explanation  would 
press  upon  or  invade  the  field  ascribed  to  conscious 
action.  And  conversely,  no  proof  that  guidance,  or  any 
other  feature  of  behavior,  is  incapable  of  mechanical 
explanation  would  serve  to  insert  consciousness  more 
firmly  in  the  biological  realm. 

14.  And  I  am  inclined  to  think  that  the  proof  that 
“ guidance  cannot  be  explained”  has  not  been  given, 
and  indeed  cannot  be  given.  Unless  I  am  mistaken  this 
alleged  gap  in  explanation  is  already  in  a  fair  way  to 
be  filled. 

The  very  effective  use  now  being  made  of  the  con¬ 
ception  of  appetite,  or  appetence,  as  a  factor  in  instinc¬ 
tive  action  by  Professor  Wallace  Craig,  when  supple¬ 
mented  by  the  studies  of  my  colleague  Professor  R.  B. 
Perry  looking  toward  a  behavioristic  view  of  purpose, 
seem  to  me  to  leave  the  physiological  view  of  instinctive 
behavior  in  a  hopeful  condition.4 

Craig  defines  appetite  (or  as  he  now  prefers  to  say, 
‘ appetence’)  as  a  state  of  agitation  which  continues  as 

4  Wallace  Craig,  Appetites  and  aversions  as  constituents  of  instincts, 
Biological  Bulletin ,  February,  1918. 

E.  B.  Perry,  Purpose  as  tendency  and  adaptation,  Philosophical  Re¬ 
view ,  September,  1917;  A  behavioristic  view  of  purpose,  The  Journal  of 
Philosophy,  Feb.  17,  1921. 


DILEMMA  IN  THE  CONCEPTION  OF  INSTINCT  455 

long  as  a  certain  stimnlns  is  absent ;  aversion  as  a  state 
of  agitation  which  continues  as  long  as  a  certain  stimu¬ 
lus  is  present.  In  the  case  of  the  appetite,  the  agitation 
is  adapted  to  set  in  motion  ‘seeking  behavior ’  which 
tends  to  lead  the  animal,  under  ordinary  circumstances, 
to  the  appeted  stimulus,  whereupon  the  reaction  ap¬ 
propriate  to  that  stimulus  follows,  and  the  organism  re¬ 
turns  to  a  state  of  comparative  repose  or  equilibrium. 
Meanwhile,  the  channels  which  that  stimulus  is  to  set 
into  action  are  in  a  curious  condition,  a  condition  dif¬ 
ferent  both  from  activity  and  from  inactivity,  and 
which  can  best  be  designated,  perhaps,  by  the  word 
‘ readiness. ’  It  is  in  this  ‘readiness’  that  we  may  now, 
according  to  Professor  Perry’s  analysis,  find  the  phys¬ 
iological  secret  of  ‘  guidance.  ’ 

15.  Readiness  is  evidently  a  present  condition,  if  it 
is  anything  at  all :  and  yet  it  refers  definitely  to  a  future 
contingency.  To  be  thirsty  is  to  be  at  the  present  time 
in  a  condition  such  that  the  sight  of  a  vessel  with  the 
proper  liquid  in  it  will  set  off  appropriate  seizing,  lift¬ 
ing,  and  drinking  reactions. 

This  present  condition  involves  a  certain  muscular 
set  as  well  as  a  certain  set  in  the  nervous  tissues.  Offer 
some  one  a  cork  ball  painted  like  a  cannon  ball,  and 
observe  what  is  involved  in  his  ‘readiness’  to  lift  a 
heavy  weight.  So  far  as  the  nervous  condition  is  con¬ 
cerned,  the  readiness  may  be  conceived  to  involve  a 
lowered  synaptic  resistance,  and  an  incipient  innerva¬ 
tion  of  a  group  of  reflexes,  of  which  the  ‘  consummatory 
reaction’  is  the  last  in  order. 

This  ‘last  in  order’ — in  the  above  case,  the  drinking 


456 


APPENDIX  I 


reaction — is  now  last  in  some  spatial  order,  as  it  will 
be  the  remotest  in  temporal  order, — much  as  the  batter 
now  last  in  a  series  of  batters  sitting  in  a  row  will  be 
the  latest  to  come  to  bat,  or  as  the  ball  now  in  the  bottom 
of  a  Roman  candle  will  be  the  latest  in  time  to  emerge. 

But  if  the  readiness  of  this  final  member  is  the  cause 
of  the  readiness  of  the  preceding  members  of  the  series, 
there  is  a  physiological  meaning  for  the  relation  ex¬ 
pressed  by  saying  that  these  preceding  members  exist 
‘for  the  sake  of’  that  final  event.  And  this  final  event, 
or  rather  the  readiness  of  its  channels,  may  in  turn  be 
said  to  ‘  select  ’  the  activities  which  lead  up  to  it. 

And  if  one  of  the  selected  preliminary  operations 
proves  unavailable  when  the  time  comes,  the  same  mech¬ 
anism  will  be  capable  of  selecting  a  substitute.  If  the 
readiness  to  drink  spreads  into  adjoining  channels  until 
it  takes  the  mental  form  of  a  plan  for  getting  a  drink 
and  then  an  actual  beginning  of  operations  upon  the 
plan,  the  failure  of  any  part  of  the  plan,  as  through  a 
missing  cup,  will  simply  divert  into  other  channels  the 
readiness  which,  so  to  speak,  radiates  from  the  channels 
of  the  consummatory  reaction.  This  peculiar  disturb¬ 
ance  tends  to  affect  in  some  degree  all  channels  which 
in  the  (generalized)  experience  of  the  animal  have  led 
up  to  the  final  event;  and  if  one  of  them  is  stopped, 
others  become  more  ready,  until  one  of  them  supplies 
the  bridge  between  the  existing  situation  and  the  ap- 
peted  end.5 

5  This  conception  of  multiple  readiness  is  used  to  explain  another  type 
of  selection  by  Joseph  Peterson.  1  1  Completeness  of  Response  as  an  Ex¬ 
planation  Principle  in  Learning,  ”  Psychological  Review,  1916,  153-162. 


DILEMMA  IN  THE  CONCEPTION  OF  INSTINCT  457 

In  all  this,  there  is  no  pretence  that  the  mechanism 
of  end-seeking  or  of  selecting  is  actually  understood: 
we  merely  suggest  that  there  are  prospects,  and  that  it 
is  too  early  to  say  a  priori  that  the  phenomena  of  guid¬ 
ance  can  have  no  physiological  expression. 

16.  The  second  barrier  to  physiological  explanations 
of  behavior  is  found  by  McDougall  in  the  fact  that 
many  responses — and  the  most  important  ones — are 
responses  not  to  sense  stimuli,  but  to  meanings.  Let  me 
recall  two  or  three  of  McDougalPs  illustrations  of  this 
difficulty. 

First,  the  telegram  illustration.  Compare  two  tele¬ 
grams, — Our  son  is  dead, — Your  son  is  dead.  Slight  dif¬ 
ference  of  sense-stimulus;  enormous  difference  of  re¬ 
sponse.  The  response  is  not  to  the  sense-stimulus,  but 
to  its  ‘  meaning.  ’ 

Second,  curiosity  in  presence  of  the  novel.  Curiosity 
has  various  other  possible  occasions,  and  novelty  vari¬ 
ous  other  possible  results :  but  let  it  be  admitted  that 
novelty  has  a  tendency  in  growing  human  organisms  to 
excite  the  behavior  characteristic  of  curiosity.  The  logi¬ 
cal  consequences  of  such  an  admission,  are  highly  in¬ 
teresting.  Assume  that  a  stimulus  may  be  defined  as  a 
sensation  or  set  of  sensations  which  will  set  off  a  given 
reaction  each  time  it  recurs.  That  which  is  novel  or 
strange  is  defined  as  that  which  has  not  previously  oc¬ 
curred,  and  which,  when  it  occurs  again,  will  no  longer 
be  novel.  If  novelty,  then,  is  a  stimulus  to  any  instinct, 
it  is  a  stimulus  which  negates  the  very  definition  of  a 
stimulus  above  given.  The  recurrence  of  novelty  con¬ 
tradicts  the  recurrence  of  sensation-groups.  Further, 


458 


APPENDIX  I 


the  novel  is  relative  to  the  experience  of  the  individual : 
that  which  is  strange  to  A  is  not  strange  to  B.  Hence 
there  can  be  no  set  of  sense- stimuli  which  can  he  uni¬ 
versally  counted  upon  to  arouse  curiosity.  Novelty  is 
uniform  only  as  a  meaning,  never  as  an  object. 

Such  instances  (and  we  may  recall  also  the  crying 
reaction  above  mentioned)  put  beyond  question  the 
proposition  that  what  occasions  the  reaction  is,  in  a 
large  part  of  behavior,  no  assignable  set  of  sensations, 
but  a  meaning.6  Indeed,  the  case  for  response  to  meaning 
is  so  clear,  when  stated,  that  Schneider’s  now  some¬ 
what  ancient  classification  of  impulses  into  sensation- 
impulses,  perception-impulses,  and  idea-impulses, 
seems  to  have  been  accepted  by  William  James  without 
hesitation : 

To  crouch  from  cold  is  a  sensation-impulse;  to  turn  and 
follow,  if  we  see  people  running  one  way,  is  a  perception  im¬ 
pulse  ;  to  cast  about  for  cover,  if  it  begins  to  blow  and  rain,  is 
an  imagination  impulse.7 

17.  But  does  the  fact  that  idea-impulses  exist  prove 
that  in  such  cases  the  event  is  not  physiological!  Not 
unless  we  commit  ourselves  to  the  view  that  having  an 
idea  or  a  meaning  is  a  mental  fact  to  which  no  event  in 
the  brain  corresponds.  But  surely  it  would  be  at  least 
as  difficult  to  prove  that  there  is  no  brain  event  corre¬ 
sponding  to  meaning  as  to  prove  that  there  is  no  brain 

6  ‘  Meaning  ’  is  here  to  be  understood  in  the  sense  of  the  general  idea, 
not  in  the  sense  of  simple  reference  from  particular  to  particular,  as 
occurs  in  any  case  of  conditioned  reflex  or  other  forms  of  the  transfer  of 
stimulus  through  learning. 

7  Psychology,  II,  p.  385. 


DILEMMA  IN  THE  CONCEPTION  OF  INSTINCT  459 

event  corresponding  to  guidance.  Admitting  to  the  full 
that  “  meaning  is  the  essential  link  in  each  case  between 
the  series  of  physical  impressions  and  the  series  of 
physical  effects” — and  I  believe  this  to  be  a  true  and 
important  observation — admitting  that  in  the  case  of 
the  crying  reaction,  ‘ 1  the  only  invariable  antecedent  of 
the  expression  of  distress  seems  to  be  disagreeable  feel¬ 
ing,”8  is  it  not  contrary  to  all  probabilities  to  suppose 
that  such  a  meaning  as  a  1 disagreeable  feeling’  is  not 
well  represented  in  a  complex  of  physiological  states? 
It  is  not  necessary  that  the  stimulus  should  be  limited 
to  congeries  of  sensations  in  order  that  it  may  be  physi¬ 
ological.  I  am  obliged  to  judge,  therefore,  that  upon 
scrutiny  this  second  barrier  likewise  disappears. 

18.  We  see  no  reason,  then,  to  set  limits  to  the  pos¬ 
sible  progress  of  physiological  explanations  of  instinct, 
— always  with  the  usual  understanding  that  no  such 
explanations  presume  to  identity  with  the  thing  ex¬ 
plained,  still  less  to  displace  it.  McDougall  is,  in  fact, 
more  concerned  to  maintain  the  positive  doctrine  that 
instinct  is  conative  in  character  than  the  negative 
thesis  that  it  is  incapable  of  physiological  explanation. 
He  has  himself  suggested  a  possible  explanation  in 
terms  of  energy.9 

But  we  must  here  point  out  that  when  we  save  the 
day  for  the  physiological  explanation  of  idea-impulses, 
or  responses  to  meaning,  by  insisting  that  there  may 
be  a  physiological  basis  for  meaning  in  some  central 
process  characteristically  different  from  sensation- 

8  Body  and  Mind,  p.  266. 

o  American  Journal  of  Insanity,  1913,  p.  866. 


460 


APPENDIX  I 


process,  we  involve  the  physiologist  in  a  serious  admis¬ 
sion  as  to  the  psychological  value  of  his  explanations, 
and  hence  of  his  entire  conception  of  instinct. 

For  the  situation  we  have  reached  is  this.  Either  the 
physiologist  must  admit  that  there  may  be  centrally 
initiated  reactions  (corresponding  to  the  responses  to 
meaning)  or  he  must  abandon  his  case.  But  if  he  admits 
such  centrally  initiated  responses,  he  admits  at  the 
same  time  that  our  knowledge  of  the  physiology  must 
be  derived  primarily  from  our  introspective  knowledge 
of  the  corresponding  experience,  not  our  knowledge  of 
the  experience  from  the  corresponding  physiology.  He 
hands  over  the  conception  of  instinct,  at  the  point  of 
its  most  important  development,  to  the  student  of  the 
mind  on  its  own  ground.  Certain  consequences  of  this 
admission  we  have  to  trace  in  our  final  section. 

Ill 

19.  The  conclusion  we  have  so  far  reached  may  be 
stated  summarily  as  follows:  We  can  save  the  possi¬ 
bility  of  a  physiological  explanation  of  instinct,  but  at 
the  cost  of  much  of  its  usefulness. 

In  the  phenomena  of  ‘ guidance ’  and  ‘response  to 
meaning  *  there  is  no  demonstrably  impassable  barrier 
to  the  physiological  theory  of  behavior.  But  neither 
of  these  phenomena  will  be  made  a  whit  clearer  by  the 
discovery  that  a  mechanical  process  can  be  imagined 
which  might  run  along  with  them.  Here  it  can  hardly 
be  said  that  the  explanation  helps  to  understand  the 
event:  it  is  rather  the  event  that  sets  the  pace  for  a 
limping  and  highly  speculative  power  of  explanation. 


DILEMMA  IN  THE  CONCEPTION  OF  INSTINCT  461 

The  possibility  of  extending  the  behavioristic  picture 
of  instinct  into  these  regions  is  highly  important  for 
the  general  theory  of  the  relation  of  body  and  mind: 
but  for  actual  investigation,  that  picture  is  useful  only 
where  we  can  identify  in  physical  terms  the  stimulus 
or  initial  situation  and  the  response.  Where  either 
stimulus,  or  response,  or  final  situation  must  be  identi¬ 
fied  with  hypothetical  conditions  of  indemonstrable 
processes  in  accessible  nervous  centers,  any  advance 
of  knowledge  must  be  gained  from  other  sources — pre¬ 
sumably  from  introspection — and  our  conception  of 
instinct  will  perforce  take  on  a  mental  ingredient. 

Let  me  now  make  this  general  conclusion  more  con¬ 
crete  by  pointing  out  how  various  further  facts  about 
instinct  likewise  carry  us  into  this  region  of  central 
factors.  These  facts  concern  chiefly  the  ways  in  which 
our  instincts  are  connected  with  one  another, — matters 
of  great  difficulty,  but  of  the  first  importance  and  of 
endless  interest.  My  contention  will  be  that  the  empiri¬ 
cal  facts  cannot  be  brought  into  their  rightful  order 
without  an  appeal  to  introspection. 

20.  Consider  first  a  group  of  facts  which  we  might 
label  the  instinctive  regulation  of  instinct. 

Our  instincts  do  not  simply  ‘go  otP  like  a  piece  of 
fireworks  when  the  fuse  is  lighted:  they  are  subject  to 
certain  adjustments  in  their  working, — adjustments 
which  are  so  universal  and  typical  that  they  are  them¬ 
selves  usually  regarded  as  instinctive,  and  might  be 
called  instincts  of  the  second  order,  or  reflexive  in¬ 
stincts. 


462 


APPENDIX  I 


Play  is  an  excellent  example.  Play  would  perhaps 
not  exist  unless  there  were  more  primitive  instincts 
needing  preliminary  exercise,  and  showing  a  budding 
readiness  before  their  day  of  maturity.  Among  the 
stimuli  of  play,  then,  we  must  reckon  this  ‘readiness/ — 
a  central  condition.  And  all  instincts  which  take  part 
in  play  are  kept  under  the  constant  control  of  mean¬ 
ings  which  can  only  be  referred  to  central  processes, — 
the  make-believe  or  feigning  idea,  for  example.  In  feign¬ 
ing,  the  normal  stimulus  of  an  instinct  may  be  absent, 
and  some  substituted  sense-object  may  assume  that 
character,  as  when  in  bayonet  practice  a  soldier  sets  up 
an  excelsior  dummy  and  imputes  to  it  the  character 
of  enemy-ergo-stimulus-to-pugnacity ;  or  the  veritable 
stimulus  may  be  present  and  the  course  of  the  reaction 
may  be  held  in  check  by  the  feigning  attitude.  This  is 
especially  the  case  in  the  feigned  hostilities  of  social 
games. 

Analogous  to  this  instinctive  control  of  instinct  in 
play — and  often  fusing  with  it — is  control  of  instinct 
by  social  dispositions.  Craig  has  observed  a  character¬ 
istic  restraint  of  pugnacity  in  the  domestic  quarrels  of 
pigeons : 

The  male  is  always  restrained  in  his  attacks  upon  his  mate. 
Indeed,  the  male  shows  restraint  even  when  quarreling  with 
neighbors  outside  his  own  family:  for  if  they  are  birds  with 
which  he  is  familiar,  he  fights  them  with  less  fury  than  he 
would  show  to  an  utter  stranger.  Many  other  examples  could 
be  given  of  what  I  must  call  the  pigeon’s  sense  of  rights  and 
duties.10 

10  American  Journal  of  Sociology ,  July,  1908,  p.  98. 


DILEMMA  IN  THE  CONCEPTION  OF  INSTINCT  463 

One  of  tlie  most  striking  of  these  instinctive  regu¬ 
lators  of  instinct,  however,  is  pugnacity  itself,  which  in 
the  above  instances  was  a  regulated  reaction,  not  a 
regulator.  For  as  McDougall  has  excellently  pointed 
out,  pugnacity  is  excited  by  a  hindrance  to  the  opera¬ 
tion  of  other  instincts,  notably  of  acquisition  and  of 
sex;  and  its  function  seems  to  be  that  of  bringing  an 
access  of  energy  to  their  pursuit. 

In  discussing  ‘guidance’  we  have  already  noted  that 
an  impeded  nervous  current  has  resources  for  finding 
some  substitute  path,  or  even  for  adopting  some  alter¬ 
native  object  of  appetence.  But  pugnacious  behavior 
is  marked  by  the  rejection  of  these  outlets:  it  insists 
on  its  object  and  on  its  path,  and  bends  its  effort  to  the 
removal  of  the  obstacle  or  the  competitor.  What  could 
be  the  physiological  sign  for  preferring  the  pugnacious 
resource  to  either  of  the  others? 

21.  The  differentia  of  the  pugnacity-arousing  situa¬ 
tion  must  lie  in  something  corresponding  to  an  unusual 
mental  reluctance  to  give  up  this  particular  object  of 
appetence,  or  this  path,  for  some  other  object  or  path, 
together  with  a  recognition  of  possible  removableness 
in  the  obstacle  or  competitor.  It  seems  to  be  a  function, 
in  part,  of  the  energy  of  appetence;  as  if  the  circum¬ 
stance  of  choosing  a  particular  object  of  pursuit  and  of 
beginning  that  pursuit  had  made  the  value  of  that  ob¬ 
ject  more  imperative,  sometimes  carrying  the  appe¬ 
tence  over  a  threshold  beyond  which  the  resource  of 
substitution  in  case  of  check  is  no  longer  admissible. 
Beyond  this  threshold,  the  determination  of  energy  is 


464 


APPENDIX  I 


toward  a  subordinate  or  auxiliary  appetence,  that  of 
removing  the  obstacle. 

But  the  pugnacity-differentia  is  also  a  function  of 
the  presumptive  removableness  of  the  obstacle,  as  may 
be  seen  by  noting  the  relation  of  pugnacity  to  two  other 
of  these  instinctive  regulators  of  instinct, — namely, 
fear  and  curiosity. 

The  place  of  the  instinct  of  fear  (or  of  flight  with  emo¬ 
tion  of  fear)  is  a  moot  point  among  psychologists ;  with 
a  strong  tendency  to  deny  the  existence  of  a  single 
instinct  of  fear,  and  to  refer  the  various  responses 
commonly  included  under  that  head  to  a  number  of 
different  6 fears.’  It  must  be  said,  however,  that  the 
search  for  a  common  element  among  these  different 
fears  has  not  been  prosecuted  with  especial  vigor, 
partly  because  physiology  has  no  clear  way  of  dealing 
with  logically  common  elements,  and  partly  because 
the  variety  of  fear-provoking  situations  is  so  great, 
varying  all  the  way  from  the  specific  stimuli  of  sudden 
loud  noises,  threatening  animal  expressions,  etc.,  to 
certain  states  of  imagination  induced  by  solitude,  dark¬ 
ness,  and  the  uncanny  generally. 

But  there  seems  to  be  a  key  to  all  this  variety  when 
we  consider  the  very  close  physiological  kinship  be¬ 
tween  pugnacity  and  fear,  which  suggests  that  if  pug¬ 
nacity  regulates  other  instincts,  fear  may  furnish  a 
complementary  regulation.  With  this  in  mind,  we  dis¬ 
cover  that  most  of  the  fear-provoking  situations  are 
fairly  described  as  situations  in  which  our  primary 
instincts  cannot  act ,  or  do  not  fit  us  for  acting.  We  have 
no  instinctive  equipment  enabling  us  to  live  in  water, 


DILEMMA  IN  THE  CONCEPTION  OF  INSTINCT  465 

or  abysses  of  air :  in  darkness,  instinctive  adjustments 
are  largely  hindered,  especially  adjustments  to  sudden 
and  stealthy  movements,  etc.  All  fear  is,  in  this  sense, 
a  reaction  to  the  uncanny.  And  fear,  in  this  common 
character,  is  an  instinctive  disposition  tending  to  re¬ 
move  the  organism  from  environments  in  which  other 
instincts  cannot  act  to  an  environment  in  which  they 
can  act. 

Pugnacity  and  fear,  then,  both  respond  to  the  thwart¬ 
ing  of  instinct;  but  pugnacity  responds  to  a  type  of 
thwarting  which  is  remediable  (typically  due  to  a  com¬ 
petitor,  hence  to  a  kindred  and  commensurable  force), 
while  fear  responds  to  a  type  of  thwarting  which  is 
irremediable. 

Both  of  these  reactions  in  their  typical  forms  are 
vigorous,  and  imply  cognitive  certainty  regarding  both 
the  unpropitiousness  of  the  environment  and  the  ques¬ 
tion  of  its  remediableness.  But  both,  again,  shade  into 
a  common  region  of  uncertainty,  in  which  the  animal 
halts  between  fear  and  fight.  In  this  case,  and  in  the 
similar  hesitation  whether  to  treat  the  environment 
as  propitious  or  as  unpropitious  there  comes  into  play, 
in  the  more  highly  developed  organisms,  a  further 
regulatory  instinct, — curiosity . 

During  growth,  curiosity  has  a  slightly  different 
regulatory  role.  At  this  time  curiosity  changes  its  direc¬ 
tion  as  the  major  instincts  develop:  thus,  when  a  boy’s 
constructive  disposition  begins  to  appear,  a  curious 
interest  in  analysis,  dissection,  etc.,  accompanies  it. 
That  same  condition  of  incipient  readiness  which 
stimulates  play  seems  to  stimulate  also  a  curiosity  to 


466 


APPENDIX  I 


which  play  itself  lends  effective  aid.  One  might  con¬ 
ceive  these  incipient  instincts  as  chronically  hesitant 
in  the  Iranian  being,  qualified  as  he  is  by  the  very  non¬ 
fixity  of  his  instincts  to  live  in  an  environment  which 
changes  from  generation  to  generation,  and  for  the 
same  reason  required  to  establish  his  own  specifica¬ 
tions  of  stimulus  and  response :  curiosity  has  obvious 
uses  in  the  growing  stage  of  such  a  creature.  But  it 
remains  as  an  auxiliary  to  all  instincts,  especially  to 
such  pairs  of  instincts  as  branch  out  in  opposite  direc¬ 
tions  from  a  common  situation,  as  do  fear  and  pug¬ 
nacity,  and  so  give  rise  to  recurrent  passes  of  uncer¬ 
tainty. 

Thus,  the  primary  instincts  are  provided  with  a  re¬ 
markable  structure  of  instinctive  regulation,  in  which 
the  stimuli  for  the  instincts  of  the  second  order,  the 
regulators,  are  finely  differentiated  conditions  of  the 
central  nervous  current.  Some  of  these  secondary  in¬ 
stincts,  perhaps  all  of  them,  have  also  specific  sense- 
stimuli  of  their  own;  but  in  human  psychology,  their 
most  important  function  is  in  this  subtle  regulation 
of  other  instincts,  which  we  can  only  explain  by  appeal¬ 
ing  to  central  stimuli. 

22.  Consider,  secondly,  the  relation  between  gen¬ 
eral  instinctive  tendencies  and  specific  mechanisms. 
As  we  have  just  noted  in  the  case  of  fear,  the  physi¬ 
ologically  verifiable  sequences  are  relatively  specific, 
and  appear  as  various  fears  rather  than  as  a  single 
instinct.  Until  it  is  seen  that  central  conditions  may 
act  as  stimuli,  physiologists  are  reluctant  to  recog¬ 
nize  a  biological  fact  corresponding  to  the  logical 


DILEMMA  IN  THE  CONCEPTION  OF  INSTINCT  467 

common  character  of  different  fears.  And  the  same 
is  true  of  all  those  general  tendencies  which  we  saw 
as  making  up  the  broad  round  of  life.11 

But  since  the  conception  of  appetence  has  given 
us  a  physiological  picture  of  the  subordination  of 
means  to  end,  and  the  conception  of  a  stimulus  has 
widened  beyond  the  sense-group  order  to  include  cen¬ 
tral  processes,  such  as  might  correspond  to  highly  gen¬ 
eral  ideas,  there  can  be  no  reason  for  further  hesitation 
to  recognize  the  broad  categories  as  genuinely  instinc¬ 
tive, — if  there  is  sufficient  reason  for  doing  so. 

That  there  is  sufficient  reason  for  recognizing 
many  of  these  general  instincts  I  have  already  indi¬ 
cated  in  my  book  on  Human  Nature  and  Its  Remaking 
(see  especially  the  tabular  ‘ Survey,1  p.  56) ;  though  I 
found  myself  at  that  time  (1918)  in  much  doubt  about 
several  of  these  categories,  and  printed  a  question 
mark  after  them.  This  was  true  particularly  of  two 
very  general  instincts  which  I  then  called  the  instinct 
to  physical  activity  and  to  physical  inactivity.  These 
would  correspond  roughly  to  the  two  types  of  re¬ 
action,  expansive  and  contractive,  from  which 
Schneider  in  his  genetic  speculations  conceived  the 

11  It  is  to  be  noted  that  the  most  specific  units  of  behavior,  such  as 
the  infant’s  grasping  reaction,  are  logically  general  in  the  sense  that 
any  object  of  the  class  defined  by  the  stimulus-description  will  set  them 
off.  The  difference  between  grasping  and  hunting  or  food-getting,  be¬ 
tween  vocalization  and  sociability,  etc.,  is  not  that  the  former  is  particu¬ 
lar  and  the  latter  general,  but  that  the  latter  (food-getting)  unifies  into 
one  sequence  a  variety  of  units  of  behavior,  subordinating  these  units 
both  as  means  to  an  end  and  as  the  less  general  to  the  more  general. 
This  logical  and  teleological  integration  of  behavior  elements  must 
certainly  not  be  forthwith  assumed  to  exist  as  a  physiological  integration. 


468 


APPENDIX  I 


rest  to  be  derived.  But  I  was  inclined  to  regard  them 
as  genuine  biological  entities  rather  because  there 
appeared  to  be  definite  units  of  behavior  belonging 
to  each: — yawning,  stretching,  rubbing  eyes,  listen¬ 
ing,  stalking,  as  fragments  of  a  process  of  passing 
from  rest  to  action, — and  corresponding  postures 
and  actions  belonging  to  the  transition  from  action  to 
repose,  sleep,  and  even  death. 

Since  that  time  my  attention  has  been  called  to  cer¬ 
tain  studies  of  Szymanski12  describing  readiness,  alert¬ 
ness,  rest,  sleep,  etc.,  as  variations  of  attention:  and 
attention  in  turn  as  a  setting  of  the  organism  in  respect 
to  the  reception  of  stimuli.  This  description  of  attention 
would  make  it  a  process  regulative  of  instinct,  but  not 
itself  an  instinctive  process.  Szymanski  proceeds,  how¬ 
ever,  to  distinguish  positive  and  negative  attention, 
sleep  being  a  negative  state  of  attention;  and  to  point 
out  that  in  the  sleeping  attitude  each  species  protects 
its  most  important  sense-organ, — insects,  for  instance, 
protecting  their  antennae.  Adjustments  of  this  sort  ap¬ 
pear  to  be  as  definitely  instinctive  as  any  of  the  more 
noted  units  of  behavior  and  the  appetence  toward  rest 
or  action  is  certainly  as  definite  as  the  appetence  of 
hunger:  I  am  inclined,  therefore,  to  regard  these  two 
tendencies  as  instincts  highly  general,  and  also  reflex¬ 
ive,  as  having  functions  regulative  of  other  instincts. 

And  while  it  must  be,  in  each  case,  a  question  of  fact 

12  Published  in  Pfliiger’s  Archiv,  1918,  under  the  title  “Allgemeine 
Betrachtungen  iiber  das  Verhalten  der  Tiere.  (1)  Korperstellungen  als 
Ausdruck  innerer  Zustande  der  Tiere.”  Reviewed  in  Psychological  Bul¬ 
letin,  June,  1920. 


DILEMMA  IN  THE  CONCEPTION  OF  INSTINCT  469 

which  of  our  general  categories  are  merely  logical  clas¬ 
sifications  and  which  are  actual  dispositions,  the  case 
in  principle  for  the  reality  of  the  general  instincts 
seems  to  me  made  out. 

23.  But  thirdly,  the  same  conditions  which  lead  us 
to  recognize  the  integration  of  units  of  behavior  under 
various  general  instincts  will  lead  us  to  recognize  a 
further  integration  which  (I  will  not  say  unifies,  but) 
tends  to  unify  the  entire  life  of  instinct. 

Even  from  the  view  of  the  most  mechanical  concep¬ 
tion  of  instinct,  the  simple  enumeration  of  instincts  in 
a  list  never  tells  the  whole  truth  about  them.  Apart  from 
the  integrations  and  regulatory  devices  above  dis¬ 
cussed,  it  is  a  commonplace  that  in  instinctive  behavior 
an  organism  typically  acts  as  a  whole ;  and  this  means, 
physiologically,  that  the  highest  centers  at  any  moment 
active  are  involved  in  the  circuit  of  the  instinctive  pro¬ 
cess.  In  mature  animals,  the  processes  in  these  centers 
have  achieved  a  momentum  of  their  own,  a  trend  of 
attention,  so  that  the  stimulus  for  any  instinct  has  a 
certain  resistance  to  overcome  before  it  can  gain  right 
of  way:  the  number  of  stimuli  that  secure  no  hearing 
at  all  is  indefinitely  greater  than  the  number  that  gain 
the  saddle.  In  the  mature  human  being,  this  trend  of 
attention  has  become  a  dominant  appetence ,  exercising 
functions  of  4 selection’  and  ‘consent’  upon  candidate- 
stimuli  in  much  the  same  way  as  we  found  particular 
appetences  exercising  ‘guidance.’  This  dominant  ap¬ 
petence  is  an  essential  part  of  what  is  termed  ‘will’: 
and  conversely,  wherever  it  is  pertinent  to  use  the  term 
‘will,’  there  the  instinctive  behavior  of  the  animal  is 


470 


APPENDIX  I 


subject  throughout  to  the  guidance  of  a  dominant  ap¬ 
petence,  which  resembles  a  most  general  instinct, — the 
persistent  but  unspecified  craving,  or  ambition,  or  wish 
of  the  entire  creature. 

24.  But  what  is  the  object  of  this  elusive  appetence 
or  craving  which  strives  toward  a  rough  unity  of  in¬ 
stinct,  and  seems  to  gather  definiteness  and  assurance 
with  evolution  and  with  individual  growth?  Can  physi- 
ology  give  us  instruction  on  this  point? 

We  should  be  able  to  learn  something  about  it  from 
current  theories  of  the  physiological  basis  of  pleasure. 
For  quite  apart  from  hedonistic  assumptions,  the  con¬ 
nection  between  pleasure  and  successful  instinct  pro¬ 
cess  is  certainly  close ;  and  any  one  who  would  choose 
the  term  ‘  value  ’  as  a  name  for  the  common  object  of  in¬ 
stinct  on  its  mental  side  would  be  inclined  to  agree  that 
the  object  of  any  most  general  instinct  or  appetence 
would  be  a  most  general  value,  qualitatively  akin  to 
pleasure. 

Now  it  certainly  cannot  be  said  that  there  is  any 
school-doctrine  among  behaviorists  about  the  nature  of 
pleasure.  But  we  occasionally  find  it  stated,  and  more 
often  assumed,  that  a  certain  ease,  or  fluency,  or  facility 
of  response  is  pleasurable,  or  is  pleasure  itself, — a 
behavioristic  version  of  Aristotle’s  observation. 
“Pleasure,”  says  Peterson  in  the  monograph  above 
referred  to,  “is  a  subjective  indication  that  the  re¬ 
sponse  is  along  the  line  of  least  resistance.”  Pleasure 
is  not  an  agent;  it  does  nothing;  it  does  not  ‘ stamp  in’ 
the  successful  reaction  after  a  series  of  unsuccessful 
trials :  pleasure  is  simply  the  character  or  form  of  the 


DILEMMA  IN  THE  CONCEPTION  OF  INSTINCT  471 

successful  act  itself.  A  tendency  toward  the  pleasurable 
would  be  a  tendency  toward  a  certain  mode  of  nervous 
process  in  the  centers,  a  particularly  fluent  or  friction¬ 
less  operation  of  the  mecbanism. 

Now,  there  is  nothing  physiologically  improbable  in 
the  view  that  nervous  processes  show  a  definite  disposi¬ 
tion  to  assume  a  specific  form  as  the  most  favorable 
form  for  their  action :  in  view  of  the  physical  analogies 
of  stream-flow,  etc.,  it  would  be  rather  physically  im¬ 
probable  that  there  should  not  he  a  disposition  of  that 
sort.  It  is  clear,  however,  that  the  idea  of  a  disposition 
which  is  due  to  the  nature  of  the  nervous  process  itself , 
and  not  to  any  canalizing  of  the  path  through  which  it 
must  pass,  threatens  to  provoke  some  radical  change 
in  our  view  of  mental  dispositions,  and  so  of  instinct. 
Just  this  is  implied  in  the  theory  of  pleasure  here  men¬ 
tioned.  A  similar  view  is  implied  in  Professor  Wood¬ 
worth’s  contention  that  all  mechanisms  have  their  own 
drive. 

For  while  Woodworth  seems  to  hold  that  the  driving 
power  lies  in  some  peculiar  concatenation  of  nervous 
elements  which  deserve  the  name  of  mechanisms,  the 
real  force  of  his  argument  appears  to  be  that  ‘  drive ’  is 
a  character  of  the  nervous  excitation  itself  wherever 
found  (which  would  certainly  follow  from  the  propo¬ 
sition  that  the  nervous  process  is  a  flow  of  energy  of 
some  sort) ;  and  that  mechanisms  merely  aid  this  ex¬ 
citation  to  take  on  certain  auspicious  forms  rather  than 
others. 

This  may  be  shown  to  advantage  by  considering  the 
criticism  which  McDougall  has  made  of  Woodworth’s 


472 


APPENDIX  I 


theory  in  a  recent  issue  of  Mind.13  It  would  follow  from 
Woodworth’s  view  that  there  could  be  a  love  of  music, 
apart  from  any  instinct  for  music,  if  there  were  mecha¬ 
nisms  congenital  or  acquired  favoring  skill  in  music. 
McDougall  is  inclined  to  deny  to  the  interest  in  music 
any  such  independent  status,  referring  it  rather  to 
affiliations  with  the  instinct-drives,  with  “ambition, 
vanity,  the  desire  to  excel,  emulation,  the  desire  to 
please  parents  or  teachers,  the  desire  to  understand, 
the  desire  to  fit  themselves  for  a  career,  the  desire  to 
overcome  difficulties,  the  vague  desire  to  give  expres¬ 
sion  to  various  emotions.”  He  further  points  out  that 
a  talent  for  music  is  no  single  thing,  but  highly  compos¬ 
ite:  “it  implies  superiority  in  such  functions  as  tone- 
discrimination,  appreciation  of  rhythm,  of  time,  of 
tone-relations.  .  .  .  But  can  we  suppose  that  such  a 
function  as  tone-discrimination  depends  on  a  ‘mecha¬ 
nism’  that  has  an  intrinsic  drivel  Do  we  ever  find  any 
one  absorbed  in  the  exercise  of  such  a  function  for  its 
own  sake !  ’  ’  The  questions  are  absolutely  pertinent :  the 
answers,  I  believe,  can  be  made  definite. 

We  certainly  do  find  persons  absorbed  in  such  func¬ 
tions  as  tone-discrimination,  for  their  own  sake.  Has 
McDougall  forgotten  those  who  choose  to  be  piano- 
tuners?  Certainly,  there  are  few  sources  of  enjoyment 
more  general  in  the  human  family  than  this  of  making 
discriminations, — as  also  of  drawing  analogies,  or  ap¬ 
plying  general  ideas  and  names  to  particular  cases. 
But  “can  we  suppose  that  such  functions  depend  on 

13  Vol.  xxix,  N.  S.,  No.  115,  pp.  278  ff. 


DILEMMA  IN  THE  CONCEPTION  OF  INSTINCT  473 

mechanisms  having  their  intrinsic  drives  ?  ’ 9  That  is  the 
damaging  question  for  Woodworth’s  theory,  and  it  is 
quite  as  damaging  for  McDougall ’s  view:  for  it  is 
equally  hard  to  think  that  such  functions  and  satisfac¬ 
tions  depend  on  the  instincts  which  McDougall  has  in 
mind. 

Consider,  for  instance,  that  ‘  ‘  appreciation  of  rhythm” 
which  according  to  McDougall  forms  part  of  the 
talent  for  music.  This  is  an  appreciation,  or  value,  so 
general  in  the  human  species  as  to  lead  some  writers 
to  ascribe  it  to  a  special  instinct.  But  it  is  certainly  not 
an  instinct  of  the  stimulus-response  pattern;  and  it  is 
not  a  disposition  that  can  boast  of  extended  animal 
ancestry.  Studies  of  rhythmic  behavior  in  animals  ren¬ 
der  it  doubtful  whether  any  animal  but  man  enjoys 
rhythm.  The  commonly  observed  rhythms  in  animal 
activity,  as  the  swinging  of  birds  on  perches,  the  chirp¬ 
ing  of  crickets,  synchronous  flapping  of  wings  in  flight 
in  flocks,  are  more  probably  explained  on  other 
grounds.14  And  the  presumption  thus  raised  against  the 
view  that  this  interest  in  man  can  be  referred  to  an 
inherited  mechanism  is  strengthened  by  the  fact  that 
the  interest  seems  rather  waxing  than  waning  in  the 
race.  But  the  facts  fall  naturally  into  place  if  we  as¬ 
sume  that  the  mode  of  central  nervous  action  which 
accompanies  the  observing  or  executing  of  rhythm  is 
intrinsically  satisfying .  If  this  value  is  to  be  referred  to 
an  instinct,  it  must  be  to  a  type  of  instinct  whose  stimu¬ 
lus  and  goal  are  alike  central,  one  which  would  have 

14  W.  Craig,  On  the  ability  of  animals  to  keep  time  with  an  external 
rhythm,  Journal  of  Animal  Behavior,  Nov.-Dee.,  1917. 


474 


APPENDIX  I 


to  be  described  in  terms  of  an  unknown  (but  presum¬ 
ably  propitious)  type  of  nervous  process. 

And  the  same,  I  believe,  would  prove  to  be  true  of 
the  other  interests  included  in  the  ‘talent  for  music/ 
as  for  most  of  the  characteristic  human  interests.  It 
will  be  found,  I  venture  to  predict,  that  Woodworth  is 
right  in  dissociating  their  ‘  drive ’  from  any  primitive 
instincts,  and  that  McDougall  is  equally  right  in  his 
distrust  of  ‘  mechanisms  ’  with  intrinsic  drives  of  their 
own.  As  physiological  psychology  reaches  clearness  in 
its  accounts  of  the  basis  of  valuation,  it  will  turn  its 
attention  away  from  the  now  prevalent  pictures  of 
paths,  synapses,  connections,  etc.,  toward  pictures  of 
the  different  forms  which  the  nervous  current  is  cap¬ 
able  of  assuming.  The  most  general  appetence  of  the 
human  being  will  appear  as  a  disposition  toward  some 
special  mode  or  form  of  the  central  flow. 

25.  But  if  this  is  the  case,  it  may  also  be  predicted 
that  for  our  chief  data  regarding  this  region  of  instinct, 
and  regarding  the  most  important  relations  among  the 
instincts,  both  we  and  physiological  psychology  itself 
will  have  to  depend  on  introspection.  Especially  the 
great  business  of  unifying  the  instincts  into  a  more  or 
less  serviceable  will  requires  the  achievement  of  a 
dominant  value-trend  which  we  shall  always  under¬ 
stand  better  from  the  way  it  appears  in  consciousness 
than  from  the  way  in  which  physiology  may  explain  it. 
The  theory  of  values  can  never  be  made  a  corollary  of 
the  theory  of  instincts. 

On  the  contrary:  the  theory  of  instincts  cannot  be 
finished  until  it  becomes,  in  its  major  part,  a  corollary 


DILEMMA  IN  THE  CONCEPTION  OF  INSTINCT  475 

of  the  theory  of  values.  In  dealing  with  the  unity  and 
connections  of  instincts,  the  theory  of  instinct  must 
change  its  base. 

For  the  unity  of  instinct  is  primarily  a  condition  of 
selfhood.  Our  chief  item  of  certainty  on  this  subject  is 
that  a  man  is  not  in  a  fully  human  position  toward  his 
own  conduct  until  he  is  prepared  to  justify  what  he 
does.  To  justify  what  he  does  means  to  give  a  ‘ reason’ 
for  it:  and  this  means,  to  refer  it  to  a  value.  But  to 
refer  conduct  to  value — not  alone  in  case  of  sporadic 
dashes  for  this  and  that  good,  but  also  in  cases  of  con¬ 
flicting  impulses  and  of  deliberate  plans  and  policies — 
requires  a  standard  of  value,  single,  and  more  stable 
than  the  competing  impulses  themselves. 

I  certainly  do  not  say  that  any  one  achieves  conscious 
possession  of  a  single  and  changeless  value-standard. 
But  I  do  say  that  human  life  implies  growth  in  that 
direction,  through  the  repeated  process  of  referring 
particular  conflicts  to  ‘  reasonable  ’  solutions.  A  large 
part  of  life  is  left  unrationalized  by  the  avoidance  of 
conflict  and  the  evasion  of  thought :  the  day ’s  program 
allows  inconsistent  goods  to  be  pursued  at  different 
times,  and  the  life  of  instinct  remains  pluralistic  and 
experimental, — fortunately  so.  But  however  we  evade 
or  distrust  the  exercise  of  that  most  dreaded  effort  we 
call  reason,  there  is  no  pair  of  goods  which  we  would 
not  submit  to  the  comparing  process  if  we  had  to.  And 
so  we  live  in  partial  pluralism,  but  on  the  assumption 
of  a  discoverable  unity  of  all  values,  and  so  of  all  in¬ 
stincts.  And  a  discoverable  unity  is,  of  course,  an  actual 
unity,  though  partly  subconscious. 


476 


APPENDIX  I 


It  is  not,  however,  unrecognizable ;  and  if  some  phil¬ 
osopher  undertakes  to  give  it  a  name,  we  can  reason¬ 
ably  discuss  whether  the  name  is  a  fit  one :  for  that 
unity  itself  exists  nowhere  if  not  as  a  working-fact  in 
our  own  active  experience.  If  Schopenhauer  calls  it  the 
will  to  live,  or  Nietzsche  the  will  to  power,  or  Freud  one 
kind  of  libido  and  Jung  another  kind,  we  can  estimate 
the  justice  and  adequacy  of  those  descriptions.  For  my 
own  part,  I  believe  that  no  description  will  be  found 
wholly  satisfactory.  But  I  have  elsewhere  given  my 
reasons  for  preferring  ‘the  will  to  power’  to  either  of 
the  others  mentioned.  It  is  a  phase  that  has  possibilities 
beyond  those  that  Nietzsche  found  in  it.  There  is  a 
clearly  ascertainable  truth  in  the  statements  that  in  all 
our  major  instincts  we  show  phases  of  a  will  to  mastery, 
— in  pugnacity,  in  curiosity,  in  sociability  in  all  its 
forms — self-assertion,  self-abasement,  sex-love  itself, 
— even  in  fear.  And  so  far  as  life  is  occupied  in  finding 
out  what  it  is  that  we  want,  that  process  may  be  de¬ 
scribed  as  a  process  of  interpreting  this  will  to  power 
that  is  in  us,  getting  rid  of  its  crudity  and  barbarism, 
putting  its  competitive  and  physical  elements  into  their 
place.  This  phrase  tells  enough  truth  about  the  nature 
of  the  unity  of  instinct  to  make  it  useful  in  the  present 
stage  of  theory. 

26.  Admitting  the  ‘will  to  power,’  then,  as  a  rough 
description  for  the  common  and  uniting  element  of  in¬ 
stinct, — always  ready  to  yield  to  a  better,  we  may  set 
up  a  working  definition  of  instinct  for  human  psychol¬ 
ogy  in  some  such  terms  as  these : 

An  instinct  is  any  specific  form  of  the  will-to-power 


DILEMMA  IN  THE  CONCEPTION  OF  INSTINCT  477 

which  reaches  its  end  by  the  use  of  innate  motor  mecha¬ 
nisms,  common  to  the  species. 

This  is  a  hybrid  definition.  It  imports  elements  of 
physiology  to  discriminate  entities  within  the  field  of 
consciousness.  It  has  that  type  of  hybridism  which  dis¬ 
tresses  the  radical  behaviorist  beyond  measure.  It 
falls  fairly  within  the  field  of  Perry ’s  remark  that 
‘ 4  wherever  (introspective)  accounts  of  the  motor-affec¬ 
tive  life  preserve  anything  distinctive  and  peculiar, 
they  incorporate  something  of  the  movement  and  action 
of  the  physical  organism.  ’ ,15 

But  to  this  remark,  which  is  intended  to  be  critical, 
our  first  reply  is  a  challenge  to  avoid  hybridism  and 
keep  usefulness  in  your  conception  if  you  can.  Our  en¬ 
tire  discussion  has  been  an  argument  to  the  effect  that 
this  cannot  be  done  by  the  behaviorist  any  more  than 
by  the  introspectionist. 

Secondly,  however,  the  hybridism  which  we  adopt  if 
we  begin  with  consciousness  is  only  apparent,  whereas 
the  hybridism  to  which  we  are  forced  if  we  begin  with 
physiology  is  both  real  and  misleading. 

In  spite  of  all  efforts  at  theoretical  purism,  the  be¬ 
haviorist  is  obliged  to  patch  up  the  elements  of  his 
mechanisms  with  mental  cohesives.  Future  reference, 
selection,  memory,  hesitation,  effort,  are  never  success¬ 
fully  reduced  to — though  they  may  be  symbolized  by — 
the  characteristics  of  nervous  interplay  with  the  world. 

But  if  we  begin  with  conscious  experience,  the  facts 
of  physiology  are  not  ultimately  alien  entities:  on 

is  The  Journal  of  Philosophy,  Feb.  17,  1921,  p.  89. 


478 


APPENDIX  I 


purely  mental  grounds  we  should  require  the  experi¬ 
ence  of  nature,  and  all  the  bodily  machinery  that  action 
within  a  world  of  nature  signifies.  In  other  words,  we 
can  derive  the  whole  set  of  behavior  phenomena  in 
principle  from  the  demands  of  consciousness:  hut  we 
cannot  in  turn  derive  the  fact,  nor  the  need,  of  conscious 
life  from  the  principles  of  the  bodily  organism  and  its 
world. 

We  have,  then,  in  our  conception  of  instinct  to  make 
a  choice  between  two  positions,  one  of  which  is  consist¬ 
ent  in  the  midst  of  its  apparent  hybridism,  the  other 
of  which  is  either  in  the  presence  of  an  ultimate  and 
confessed  mystery  or  else  presents  us  with  a  helpless 
and  unfinishahle  torso  of  a  man. 


APPENDIX  II 


THE  SOURCE  OF  OBLIGATION 

IN  our  account  of  sin  there  is  a  missing  element.  It 
is  the  missing  element,  but  the  implied  element, 
in  all  psychology,  namely,  the  outer  world.  We  have 
described  the  moral  undertaking  as  a  struggle  within 
self-consciousness,  the  effort  of  a  self  to  pull  itself 
together,  as  it  were,  from  the  midst  of  a  mass  of  would- 
be  independent  impulses, — to  find  its  own  meaning  and 
to  make  every  instinct  share  in  that  meaning.  Sin  we 
described  simply  as  the  deliberate  suppression  of  mean¬ 
ing,  the  treason  of  self-consciousness  to  its  own  most 
vital  effort.  In  all  this  the  outer  world  has  been  in 
abeyance;  but  it  has  not  been  forgotten.  An  ‘ 4 impulse’ ’ 
is  but  an  abbreviated  name  for  an  “  impulse  to  this  or 
that  action,  and  for  the  sake  of  this  or  that  objective 
good.  ’ ’  All  psychological  terms  are  just  such  abbrevia¬ 
tions,  naming  a  relation  to  reality  from  the  inner  end. 
Our  term,  the  will  to  power,  carries  the  external  refer¬ 
ence  on  its  face.  And  so,  while  we  have  spoken  of  obliga¬ 
tion  as  the  debt  of  a  partial  impulse  to  a  total  will,  a 
relation  wholly  within  the  mind,  we  have  not  been  un¬ 
mindful  of  the  corresponding  relation  in  the  world  of 
objects,  that  between  a  partial  good  and  a  total  good. 

But  if  this  total  good,  the  object  of  my  total  will, 
is  thought  of  simply  as  my  own  good,  we  have  not 


480 


APPENDIX  II 


reached  the  center  of  the  idea  of  ‘  obligation.  ’  Obliga¬ 
tion  descends  upon  me  from  a  region  beyond  anything 
that  I  can  call  mine;  it  has  its  source  in  the  interest 
of  some  being  other  than  myself  in  my  conduct.  My 
duty  is  the  inner  angle  of  that  other  being’s  right.  The 
nature  of  sin  may  be  understood  on  the  ground  of  psy¬ 
chology,  but  the  degree  of  importance  attached  to  sin 
and  righteousness  cannot  be  understood  without  a 
study  of  the  external  source  of  obligation. 

I 

The  most  natural,  and  popular,  view  of  the  case  is 
that  I  owe  obligation  primarily  to  my  neighbor:  any 
and  every  other  man  is  the  repository  of  some  right  in 
relation  to  me.  The  essence  of  wrong  is  the  disregard 
of  these  rights ;  and  sin,  on  its  practical  side,  is  there¬ 
fore  simply  selfishness.  Or  if  ‘selfishness’  is  too  limited 
a  term — too  naive  possibly,  or  merely  indulgent  or 
passive — then  join  with  it  ‘self-will,’  which  may  be  as 
vigorous  and  determined  as  you  please.  Sin  is  wilful, 
unfriendly,  or  unsocial  conduct. 

This  view  covers  most  of  the  ground,  if  we  can  think 
of  the  moral  aspect  of  behavior  in  terms  of  areas.  Most 
sins  are  unsocial  acts.  In  most  cases,  the  wider  thought- 
system  which  I  ought  to  consider  is  one  which  takes  in 
more  of  the  minds  of  other  persons.  This  is  a  good  rule 
of  thumb,  especially  for  the  public  phases  of  moral 
questions.  But  our  question  is  not  whether  most  sinful 
acts  are  unsocial  acts:  it  is  whether  any  act  is  sinful 
because  it  is  unsocial  or  unneighborly. 


THE  SOURCE  OF  OBLIGATION 


481 


If  you  define  a  world  with  two  wills  in  it,  and  with 
an  insufficient  supply  of  goods  and  consequent  unsat¬ 
isfied  wants,  it  is  not  obvious  that  either  will  ought  to 
give  way  to  the  other,  or  that  each  should  do  so.  So  long 
as  they  are  two  wills,  related  in  such  wise  that  the  al¬ 
truism  of  one  is  the  egoism  of  the  other,  the  idea  of 
obligation  cannot  be  extracted  from  the  situation.  I 
cannot  find  it  in  the  simple  fact  of  my  neighbor’s 
existence  nor  of  his  want. 

Nor  am  I  convinced,  though  I  may  be  overawed,  when 
you  multiply  and  organize  and  perpetuate  this  needy 
neighbor,  and  call  it  society,  or  the  State.  Professor 
E.  A.  Ross  represents  a  large  body  of  opinion  when  he 
makes  the  egoism  of  society  the  proper  object  of  my 
altruism  and  self-sacrifice.1  But  who  is  this  social  ego, 
that  I  should  thus  indulge  it?  I  am  inclined  by  many 
natural  impulses  to  accept  suggestions  from  a  social 
group  and  to  deal  sympathetically  with  its  members; 
but  this  is  something  short  of  accepting  the  group  as  a 
final  authority  for  my  deference.  The  moral  quality  of 
the  behavior  of  Socrates  or  of  John  Brown  is  not  de¬ 
cided  by  the  circumstance  that  it  both  antagonized  and 

i  Social  Control,  p.  67.  Professor  Ross  would  scorn  the  idea  that  he  has 
dealings  with  the  absolute;  yet  I  must  accuse  him  of  setting  up  an 
absolute  in  the  form  of  this  social  ego.  And  many  others  to-day  who 
think  that  ‘absolute’  is  a  bad  word,  calling  themselves  pragmatists,  and 
saying  that  right  must  be  relative  to  the  stage  of  social  progress  and 
to  the  social  good  at  any  stage,  are  in  the  same  position.  For  whatever 
thing  is  stated  as  the  thing  to  which  other  things  are  relative,  is  by 
definition  their  absolute.  The  pragmatic  moralists,  for  the  most  part, 
have  simply  chosen  a  social  absolute  instead  of  some  other.  Their 
question  should  be  not  whether  there  is  an  absolute  in  morals,  but 
whether  they  have  the  right  one. 


482 


APPENDIX  II 


tended  to  dissolve  the  society  in  which  it  appeared.  If 
yon  answer,  in  view  of  these  examples,  that  it  is  not 
what  men  actually  want,  but  what  they  rightfully  want, 
that  is  authoritative  over  me,  you  abandon  the  case.  If 
another  mind,  single  or  collective,  is  a  source  of  obli¬ 
gation  only  when  it  desires  what  it  ought  to  desire,  the 
implication  is  that  I  have  an  ‘  ought  ’  only  when  the 
other  mind  has  an  ‘  ought,  ’  and  we  are  as  far  from  the 
source  of  obligation  as  before. 

This  is  not  a  mere  logical  quibble :  like  all  good  logic, 
it  is  but  the  briefest  expression  of  what  experience, 
at  great  length,  teaches.  That  I  have  an  ‘ought’  to 
another  only  when  the  other  has  an  ‘  ought  ’  also,  is 
quite  plainly  a  result  of  experience.  We  do  not  find 
ourselves  moved  by  respect  toward  others  on  the 
ground  of  their  existence,  their  force  or  their  prowess, 
hut  only  as  they  themselves  show  respect  to  something 
beyond.  Need  itself  would  not  move  us  if  need  were 
arrogant  rather  than  earnest.  It  is  pure  futility  to 
attempt  deriving  the  sentiment  of  reverence  from  any 
mixture  of  fear,  awe,  self-abnegation,  etc.  :2  reverence 
goes  to  the  reverent,  and  to  no  others.  This  is  the  main 
part  of  the  answer  to  the  occasional  anxious  question, 
What  can  he  done  for  the  sobering  of  an  irreverent 
younger  generation?:  the  secular-minded  person,  so¬ 
ciety,  State,  receives  and  deserves  slight  deference;  it 
is  man  at  worship  who  alone  becomes  worshipful,  and 
no  pedagogical  finesse  can  outleap  this  principle.  When- 
ever  men  defer  to  each  other,  admit  duties  to  the  other  ’s 

2  McDougall,  Social  Psychology ,  p.  132. 


THE  SOURCE  OF  OBLIGATION 


483 


rights,  it  will  be  found  that  there  is  a  twofold  deference : 
each  is  deferring  to  a  third  entity,  dimly  discerned  as 
a  mutual  object  of  respect,  and  not  to  the  other  as  in¬ 
dividual.  Is  it  not  in  some  such  relatively  abstract  third 
that  we  find  the  real  source  of  obligation?  Such  is  the 
view  of  Kant,  who  defines  right  not  in  terms  of  society, 
but  in  terms  of  a  law,  which  is  over  all  alike. 

II 

In  setting  up  a  law  as  the  supreme  object  of  respect, 
Kant  seems  almost  to  abandon  the  outer  world  and  to 
leave  the  individual  alone  once  more  with  the  workings 
of  his  own  reason.  This  law  is  occupied  entirely  with 
what  we  have  called  the  “meaning”  of  an  action.  Every 
decision,  thinks  Kant,  is  made  upon  some  general  prin¬ 
ciple  or  “maxim”:  this  is  my  reason,  or  excuse,  for 
the  act, — it  is  what  the  act  means  to  me.  The  require¬ 
ment  of  duty  is  simply  that  I  shall  be  willing  to  stand  by 
these  meanings,  when  I  think  of  them  as  being  univer¬ 
sally  adopted.  “Admit  into  your  conduct  only  such 
meaning  as  you  would  willingly  see  universal” — such 
is  the  essence  of  Kant’s  law. 

To  apply  this  law,  I  must  use  both  imagination  and 
logic.  I  must  imagine  my  motive  made  universal ;  I  must 
conceive  every  act  as  conveying  a  tacit  recommendation 
of  its  ‘ maxim’  for  general  use:  and  I  must  consider 
whether,  in  all  logic,  I  can  stand  by  it.  Like  a  marksman, 
the  moral  being  has  a  1  picture’  to  which  it  is  imperative 
he  should  adjust  his  sight, — that  of  perfect  consistency 
of  policy  throughout  a  rational  universe.  When  his  act 


484 


APPENDIX  II 


presents  him  this  picture,  he  may  release  it, — it  is  right. 
This  picture,  and  nothing  more  concrete,  is  the  object 
of  his  obligation. 

One  must  use  imagination,  I  say,  to  apply  Kant’s 
law,  yet  it  would  be  highly  unjust  to  represent  this 
law  as  a  purely  imaginary  object  of  devotion.  The  tend¬ 
ency  of  our  maxims,  or  meanings,  to  propagate  them¬ 
selves  is  real  enough.  Acts,  we  say,  tend  to  establish 
habits, — a  very  crude  bit  of  psycho-physics  and  only 
half  true.  For  no  one  can  tell  from  the  mechanics  of  an 
act  what  habit  it  tends  to  establish.  I  give  a  penny  to 
a  beggar:  what  habit  does  this  leave  behind?  If  I  give 
it  from  pity,  one  habit;  if  for  display,  another  habit; 
if  for  getting  rid  of  the  beggar,  a  third.  Everything 
depends  on  the  meaning:  it  is  this  alone  that  univer¬ 
salizes  itself.  Self-propagation  of  maxims  both  within 
and  without  an  individual  life  is  no  mere  fancy;  and 
sin,  from  Kant’s  point  of  view,  appears  as  the  refusal 
to  accept  the  very  real  legislative  responsibility  of  an 
act  for  its  maxim. 

It  must  be  admitted,  too,  that  Kant’s  theory  agrees 
closely  with  moral  experience.  When  men  refrain  from 
breaches  of  the  peace,  or  of  contract,  is  it  not  because 
they  perceive  quite  beyond  any  actual  consequences 
that  that  kind  of  principle  will  not  do  for  general  use  ? 
And  if  they  go  out  of  their  way  for  mutual  aid,  or  for 
the  service  of  a  nation,  is  there  not,  behind  the  personal 
or  patriotic  sympathies  invoked,  a  sense  that  the  prin¬ 
ciple  of  refusal  means  ruin  to  a  certain  spiritual  struc¬ 
ture  which  has  been  an  object  of  unspoken  faith?  What 
one  instinctively  holds  to,  and  tries  to  preserve,  is  not 


THE  SOURCE  OF  OBLIGATION 


485 


‘ society,’  as  an  eating  and  breeding  entity  (otherwise 
onr  minds  would  be  attuned  as  pragmatically  as  our 
language  often  sounds) ;  it  is  the  world  as  a  place  of 
consistent,  thoughtful  meanings,  the  home  of  universal 
law. 

The  error  of  Kant’s  idea  is  not  that  his  law  is  too 
formal  and  empty,  nor  that  it  is  too  vigorous  and  un¬ 
bending.  These  two  criticisms  may  be  left  to  cancel  one 
another ;  for  a  law  so  abstract  as  to  command  nothing 
at  all  can  hardly  be  so  rigid  as  to  allow  no  room  for 
individuality  and  growth.  Kant’s  law  stands  near  to 
that  critical  point  which  a  perfect  test  of  right  and 
wrong  must  hold :  it  is  abstract  enough  to  free  the  mind 
from  all  tyranny  of  concrete  absolutes  (as  the  ten  com¬ 
mandments)  ;  it  is  not  so  abstract  as  to  be  devoid  of 
meaning. 

The  trouble  with  the  Kantian  theorv  is  that  the  law 

•/ 

in  question  is  just  a  test  or  criterion  of  right  and 
wrong;  it  is  not  itself  the  source  of  obligation.  A  cri¬ 
terion  must  be  abstract — it  would  be  absurd  to  criti¬ 
cise  a  thermometer  as  a  test  of  fever  because  a  ther¬ 
mometer  is  not  itself  a  temperature.  But  no  abstraction 
can  be  a  source  of  obligation.  Kant’s  notable  utterance 
of  reverence  for  the  moral  law  involves  attributing  to 
that  law  a  substantial  reality,  like  that  of  the  “starry 
heavens,”  and  more  so.  It  is  only  because  the  law  was 
to  Kant  the  point  of  contact  between  experience  and  a 
world  metaphysical,  ‘intelligible,’  and  total  that  it 
could  seem  to  command  the  allegiance  of  practical 


reason. 


486 


APPENDIX  II 


III 

The  source  of  obligation  must  be  something  that 
unites  the  living  reality  of  fellow  men  and  society  with 
the  totality  and  finality  of  the  Kantian  law.  If  we  have 
no  conception  at  hand  which  promises  at  once  to  unite 
these  characters,  the  schoolmen  certainly  had,  and  we 
may  still  learn  something  from  them. 

Thomas  Aquinas  was  already  familiar  with  the  idea 
that  the  moral  law  should  be  followed  for  the  sake  of 
the  moral  law;  and  he  had  already  pronounced  this 
view,  in  so  many  words,  to  be  unmoral.3  For  the  law 
exists  only  for  the  sake  of  a  goal  or  destiny  of  human 
life, — our  real  obligation  is  to  that  destiny.4  We  have 
a  particular  interest  in  the  views  of  St.  Thomas,  since 
he  has  stated  his  idea  of  obligation  in  connection  with 
a  theory  of  instinct. 

The  lower  animals,  he  thinks,  are  governed  by  in¬ 
stinct,  and  especially  by  a  fundamental  life-instinct 
which  controls  all  lesser  instincts.  In  man  there  is 
something  which  corresponds  to  this  central  life-in¬ 
stinct,  indicating  to  him  his  destiny:  it  is  his  ‘ synder- 
esis.’  It  is  defined  as  a  desire  or  longing  which  presents 
to  us  our  total  possible  good  in  the  form  of  an  antici¬ 
patory  vision.5  Its  claim  upon  our  duty  lies  in  part  in 
the  fact  that  it  presents  to  us  our  possible  blessedness ; 
it  commands  us  to  live  according  to  reason,  but  that 

3  Summa,  I,  d.  1,  q.  2,  a.  1,  ad.  3. 

4  Summa,  I,  2,  q.  71,  a.  6,  ad.  3. 

6  ‘ ‘ Inchoatio  boni,,j  in  another  phrase,  “desiderium  naturale,  vo¬ 
luntas  ut  natura.  ’  ’ 


THE  SOURCE  OF  OBLIGATION  487 

means  to  St.  Thomas,  using  the  behavior  which  reason 
shows  as  means  to  blessedness. 

Sin,  from  this  view,  is  a  rejection  of  one’s  own  bless¬ 
edness;  but  it  is  sin  because  that  rejection  concerns 
another  than  ourselves,  namely,  the  appointer  of  des¬ 
tiny,  the  real  being.  The  interest  of  God  in  our  realiza¬ 
tion  of  our  destiny  is  not  simply  that  of  one  who  has 
devised  that  destiny ;  it  is  the  interest  of  one  who  is  to 
participate  in  it.  For  blessedness,  according  to  Aquinas, 
is  found  in  union  with  God :  such  union  is  at  the  same 
time  a  fulfilment  of  God’s  will  and  of  our  own. 

I  am  not  concerned  here  to  discuss  the  accuracy  of 
these  metaphysical  ideas :  I  only  wish  to  point  out  that 
our  moral  experience  gives  much  weight  to  this  account 
of  the  source  of  obligation.  Unless  the  universe  has 
a  central  and  unified  life  in  which  our  destinies  are 
involved,  and  which  gives  these  destinies  a  higher  im¬ 
portance  than  they  can  have  for  our  own  finite  vision, 
the  notion  of  obligation  loses  the  degree  of  dignity 
which  we,  in  fact,  ascribe  to  it.  When  we  speak  of  the 
rights  of  man  and  the  duties  of  man,  the  respect  we 
accord  them  is  measured  by  our  belief  that  they  belong 
to  man  as  a  metaphysical  entity,  a  ward  of  the  universe. 
The  work  these  “ rights”  have  done  in  history  may  tes¬ 
tify  to  the  truth  of  this  statement. 

And  our  interest  in  our  destiny  is  at  the  same  time, 
as  Aquinas  says,  an  interest  in  a  possible  blessedness ; 
though  not  simply  in  a  far-off  divine  event.  For  the 
destiny  of  the  human  will  is  to  co-operate,  in  some 
degree  of  present  awareness,  with  the  central  power 
of  the  world;  and  so  far  to  perceive  in  present  expe- 


488 


APPENDIX  II 


rience  the  quality  of  “ union  with  God.”  In  their  com¬ 
plete  meaning,  our  human  actions  are  not  only  law- 
giving  in  an  ideal  world, — they  are  creative  in  an  ac¬ 
tual,  but  unfinished  world.  Acting  as  artists  and  origi¬ 
nators,  every  deed  may  be  more  than  a  conformity  to 
a  rule,  or  a  subsumption  under  a  preconceived  good: 
it  may  be  also  an  invention,  a  new  fact.  It  may  assume 
in  its  own  degree  a  will  to  power  which  is  not  inter¬ 
preted  adequately  as  a  suggesting  of  maxims  for  gen¬ 
eral  use,  but  rather  as  a  contribution  through  our 
thought  to  the  spiritual  substance  of  the  world.  Thus 
to  conceive  each  deed  is  the  best  privilege  of  human 
nature.  Our  obligation  in  its  ultimate  interpretation, 
to  achieve  such  blessedness.  And  from  the  same  posi¬ 
tion  we  reach  the  completest  expression  of  what  we  are 
to  understand  by  sin. 

If  right  action  is  action  so  interpreted  that  I  assume 
the  place  of  creator  to  my  own  destiny  and  that  of 
others,  wrong  action  appears  as  a  false  assumption  of 
this  same  place.  But  the  false  claim  to  be  doing  the 
work  of  a  god  in  the  world  is  precisely  what  the  Greeks 
called  and  the  Romans  superba ;  and  we,  with 

hardly  equivalent  force,  presumption.  Inasmuch  as  it 
is  not  usual  for  us  to  conceive  our  deeds  consciously 
sub  specie  ceternitatis,  at  least  not  one  by  one,  this  may 
appear  as  a  somewhat  imaginative  extension  of  the 
meaning  of  sin.  Nevertheless,  with  the  right  of  inter¬ 
preting  which  we  have  no  choice  but  to  use,  the  ordinary 
courage  of  men  who  daily  face  their  own  destiny  as  an 
entire  metaphysical  fact  involves  just  this  will  to  stand 
in  loco  Dei  to  the  circumstances  with  which  they  deal. 


THE  SOURCE  OF  OBLIGATION 


489 


Inasmuch  as  they  are  human  they,  in  turn,  have  no 
choice  but  to  see  things  whole,  and  as  nearly  as  possible 
as  they  are.  What  an  act  conveys  in  meaning  is  not  the 
work  of  a  special  conscious  judgment:  it  is,  as  we  have 
said,  the  sense  imposed  upon  it  by  its  total  context.  And 
thus,  whether  we  will  or  not,  our  acts  have  for  us  a 
metaphysical  meaning.  But  there  is  this  difference  be¬ 
tween  the  Greek  conception  and  our  own.  To  the  Greeks 
the  sin  of  arrogance,  'a/3/H5  consisted  in  forgetting  to 
think  as  mortals ;  and  its  punishment  was  like  the  pun¬ 
ishment  of  Babel,  a  dizziness,  bewilderment,  madness, 
such  as  must  come  to  those  who  are  out  of  their  own 
element.  To  us,  sin  consists  equally  in  forgetting  to 
think  as  gods.  It  was  Aristotle  who,  in  replying  to  the 
charge  that  philosophical  thought  was  itself  arrogant, 
uttered  the  proud  word,  ‘ ‘Let  us  live,  then,  as  if  divinity 
(immortality)  were  our  share.’ ’  We  would  add  only: 
This  is  man’s  native  element.  It  is  his  destiny  so  to  live. 
His  sin  is  to  neglect  that  destiny — or  to  assume  it 
unworthily. 

We  have  here,  too,  perhaps  the  best  illustration  of 
the  principle  we  have  noted  from  time  to  time;  that 
of  the  descriptive  identity  of  sin  and  virtue.  In  the 
higher  reaches  of  self-consciousness,  the  difficulty  of 
decision  often  lies  here.  If  any  one  assumes  a  position 
of  moral  leadership,  and  therefore  of  moral  solitude, 
he  cannot  wholly  avoid  fearing  his  own  audacity ;  hence 
the  conflict  which  we  know  to  have  taken  place  in  the 
minds  of  such  men  as  Mazzini,  Luther,  Lincoln, — the 
conflict  of  determining  the  narrow  margin  between  the 
true  and  the  false  presumption.  The  reported  tempta- 


490 


APPENDIX  II 


tion  of  Jesus  seems  to  be  a  symbolical  account  of  an 
inner  struggle  such  as  could  occur  only  to  one  who  had 
gone  far  on  the  way  to  a  great  cast  of  cosmic  boldness. 
To  presume  so  much  was  to  “make  himself  equal  with 
God”;  to  presume  less  was  to  be  false  to  his  own 
genius. 


INDEX 


Absolute,  33,  313,  354,  374,  378, 
391,  434. 

Acquisition,  instinct  of,  67,  79,  119, 
272. 

Activity,  general  instinct  to,  7 0  f ., 
468. 

Admiration,  220. 

Adolescence,  272  if.,  320,  321. 

Mschylus,  291  f. 

^Esthetic  experience  (see  also  Art), 
66,  83,  217,  327,  329  f.,  338, 
377  f.,  392. 

After-image,  mental,  184  f .,  195, 
199,  339. 

Alternation,  chs.  XXXIY,  XXXV, 
esp.  p.  312,  and  pp.  353  f.,  392  f. 

Altruism,  113,  211,  213,  253  f.,  481. 

Ambition,  ch.  XLIII  and  pp.  167, 
202,  302,  304,  345,  404,  414. 

Anger  (v.  Pugnacity),  58,  59,  66, 
141,  143,  442. 

Animism,  268. 

Anxiety-neurosis,  27,  165  f. 

Appetence,  Appetite,  29,  53,  56, 
454. 

A  priori,  58,  328,  332,  338. 

Aquinas,  Thomas,  486  ff. 

Aristotle,  111  1,  135,  163,  211,  212, 
218,  256,  300,  308,  422,  489. 

Art  (v.  ^Esthetic  experience),  ch. 
XXXVIII,  p.  339,  and  also  pp. 
5,  8,  97,  104,  132,  217,  256,  315, 
354. 

Asceticism  (v.  Saintly  ideal),  241, 
350,  352  ff.,  379  ff. 


Atonement,  405,  419,  438  f. 

Augustine,  163,  357. 

Authority  (v.  Recommenders) ,  121, 
154  f.,  220,  273. 

Babbitt,  I.,  35  n. 

Bagehot,  W .,  224  n.,  337  n. 

Balance  of  instincts,  65,  71,  207. 

Beautiful,  The,  343. 

Behavior-ism,  50  f.,  103,  365,  444, 
447,  461. 

Belief,  264. 

Bergson,  E.,  7,  43,  63,  99  n.,  193, 
239  n.,  342,  436,  452. 

Blame  (v.  Justice),  164,  165  n. 

Body  and  Mind,  ch.  XII,  p.  102, 
and  also  p.  453. 

Bohemia,  132  f.,  263. 

Bosanquet,  B.,  22. 

Brahmanism,  ch.  XXXVII  passim, 
and  also  pp.  356,  418  ff. 

Buddha,  Buddhism,  23,  98,  135, 
357,  397  ff.,  418  ff. 

Burke,  Eclm.,  34  f.,  154,  209. 

Cabot,  B.  C.,  353  n. 

Calvinism,  127. 

Carpenter,  J.  E.,  419  n. 

Carver,  T.  N.,  27  n. 

Catholicism  (v.  Church),  402. 

Causality,  182  ff. 

Central  instincts,  ch.  X,  p.  80,  and 
also  pp.  66,  73,  91  f.,  139,  466  ff. 

Chadbourne,  P.  A.,  63,  75. 

Character,  125,  162,  172,  172  n., 
347. 


492 


INDEX 


Chesterton ,  G.  K.,  149  n. 

Christianity,  Part  VII,  and  also  pp. 
29,  35,  43,  241,  355,  405,  423, 
490. 

Church,  399,  401. 

Civilization,  429  ff. 

Climbing  instinct,  68,  266. 

Ccensesthesia,  183. 

Cognition  (as  ingredient  in  value), 
83  f.,  104  f .,  246. 

Competitive  and  non-competitive 
interests,  97,  209,  227,  266  f. 

Confucius,  28. 

Conscience,  Part  III,  p.  Ill,  and 
also  pp.  27,  194. 

Consciousness  (v.  Self-conscious¬ 
ness,  Behavior),  7,  15,  54,  128, 
454. 

Conservatism,  250  f.,  255,  280. 

Contract,  social  (v.  State,  Poli¬ 
tics),  220,  224,  235. 

Convention  (v.  Custom),  201,  381. 

Conversation,  12  n.,  212. 

Conversion  (v.  Rebirth),  29,  43, 
321,  366,  400. 

Craig,  W.,  53  n.,  454,  462,  473  n. 

Cram,  Ealph  Adams,  341  n. 

Crime,  283. 

Criticism,  8,  11,  369  f. 

Culture,  232,  246,  287. 

Curiosity,  instinct  of,  34,  69,  73, 
80  f.,  89,  112,  179,  276,  421,  429, 
457,  464. 

Custom  (v.  Convention),  122,  131, 
147,  192,  205,  209,  297. 

Cynicism,  377. 

Darwin,  Ch.,  64. 

Death,  3. 

Democracy,  94,  249,  341  n.,  348, 
355,  410,  414,  431. 

Desire  (v.  Feeling),  56,  91  f.,  104, 
105  n.,  245. 


Dewey,  John,  92  n.,  138  n.,  192  ff. 

Dialectic,  187,  199,  220  n.,  233  f., 
286,  288  f.,  368,  380  ff.,  386,  398, 
426. 

Dignity,  329. 

Dilemmas,  moral,  152,  288. 

Discipline,  chs.  IV-VI,  and  pp.  23, 
280  f. 

Discrimination,  208,  245. 

Dogma,  427. 

Dostoievski,  167. 

Dreams,  339. 

Driesch,  H.,  452. 

Durkheim,  E.,  235. 

Duty,  479  ff. 

Economics,  13,  27,  227  ff.,  235,  246, 
336. 

Education,  ch.  XXX,  p.  253,  and 
also  pp.  8,  42,  117,  172  n.,  173, 
185,  199,  319,  345,  369  ff.,  482. 

Emotion  and  Instinct,  56  f. 

Energism,  241. 

Energy,  103,  459. 

Environment,  3  ff. 

Equality,  19,  335,  348. 

Equity  (v.  Justice). 

Eugenics,  19. 

Evil,  12,  43,  131,  154,  159,  241  ff., 
286,  289,  342,  417,  426. 

Evolution,  3  ff. 

Experience  (v.  Dialectic,  Dilemma, 
Logie,  Pragmatism),  Part  IV, 
p.  169,  and  also  pp.  20,  41,  45, 
90  f.,  172,  338,  339,  340. 

Experimentalism  (v.  Pragmatism, 
Experience),  249,  250,  251,  252, 
432,  438  f. 

Expressionism  (v.  Freud,  Libera¬ 
tion),  36. 

Family  (v.  also  Private  Order), 
222,  238,  291  f.,  306  f.,  348. 


INDEX 


Fear  (and  flight),  instinct  of,  58, 
64,  66,  69  ft'.,  80,  89  n.,  95,  116, 
176,  294,  397,  442  f.,  464. 

Feeling  (v.  Desire,  Cognition),  58, 
104  1,  294,  363  f. 

Fichte,  J.  G.,  420  n. 

Food-getting  instinct,  34,  68,  94, 
200,  206,  324. 

Foster,  G.  B.,  407  n. 

Franklin,  Benj.,  151. 

Freedom  (v.  Liberty,  Eight),  ch. 
Ill,  p.  15,  and  also  pp.  32,  115  n., 
150  ff.,  171,  222,  364. 

Freud,  S.,  Freudism,  25,  36  f ., 
98  ff.,  340  n.,  380,  444. 

General  instincts,  175,  176. 

God,  27,  352,  417,  422  f.,  425. 

Gregariousness,  instinct  of  (v. 
Sociability),  34. 

Grotius,  H.,  65. 

Habit,  54,  92,  172,  178,  192  ff.,  484. 

Hadley,  A.  T.,  251  n. 

Hall,  Stanley,  135. 

Hammurabi,  334. 

Hate  (v.  also  Pugnacity),  375. 

Happiness,  243,  263. 

Hedonism,  186,  241. 

Hegel,  G.  W.  F.,  32,  38,  209,  220  n., 
226,  237  n.,  239. 

Heredity,  17,  50  f. 

Hobbes,  Thomas,  49,  65,  148  n., 
157,  209,  224,  225,  226,  229. 

Holt,  E.  B.,  26  n.,  32,  88,  199  n., 
241. 

Hume,  David,  41,  225  n. 

Hunger  (v.  Food-getting  instinct), 
64,  94. 

Idea  (v.  Cognition,  Intelligence), 
166,  231,  343,  374,  382,  392,  409, 
412. 


493 

Ideals,  8,  22  f.,  41  n.,  92,  209,  211 
ff.,  238,  378. 

Imitation  (v.  Admiration,  Author¬ 
ity),  220,  341. 

Immortality,  166,  234,  388,  390, 
397. 

Incarnation,  413. 

Individualism,  173,  190  f.,  199,  204, 
210,  212,  231,  275  f.,  280  f., 

347  f. 

Individuality,  427. 

Infancy,  63. 

Instinct,  chs.  VII  ff.,  Appendix  I, 
p.  441,  and  also  pp.  31,  433. 

Institution,  8,  209,  238  ff.,  304,  356. 

Insurance,  224. 

Intelligence,  175  f.,  181  f. 

Interpretation  (v.  Meaning),  81, 
91,  140,  3241,  345,  380,  394, 
404. 

Intuition,  15,  17,  331,  382. 

James,  Wm.,  27,  63,  75,  76,  270, 
365,  450,  458. 

Josey,  C.  C.,  193. 

Judaism,  362. 

Jung,  C.  G.,  99. 

Jury,  130. 

Justice  (v.  Blame,  Eight,  Law), 
111,  166,  223,  284,  333,  373  ff., 
392. 

Kant,  I.,  32,  106  n.,  270,  353,  366, 
408,  483  f. 

Karma,  332. 

Knowledge  (v.  Cognition,  Self- 
consciousness,  Eeason). 

Kohler,  J.,  224  n.,  225  n.,  229, 236  n. 

Labor  (v.  Economics,  Food-get¬ 
ting),  211,  247,  274. 

Language,  8,  22,  113  n.,  118  n., 
376,  381  f. 


INDEX 


494 

Law,  Legislation  (v.  Politics,  Jus¬ 
tice,  State),  8,  18,  24,  145,  214  f., 
223  f.,  249,  318  f.,  322  ff.,  483. 

Learning,  curve  of,  151. 

Lee,  Joseph,  84  n. 

Leibniz,  102. 

Leuba,  James  H.,  397  n. 

Liberalism,  13,  23. 

Liberation,  Liberators,  ch.  IV  ff. 

Liberty  (v.  Freedom,  Right),  28, 
31,  200,  249,  257. 

Lippert,  J.,  119. 

Locke,  J.,  214,  328. 

Locomotion,  instinct  of,  68  f. 

Logic  in  psychology,  98,  107,  128, 
144,  221,  482  f. 

Love  (v.  Parental  instinct,  Altru¬ 
ism,  Sex,  Sociability),  64,  68,  98, 
164,  306,  311,  365  f.,  375,  378. 

McDougall,  William,  64,  72,  76  f., 
81,  82,  114,  143  n.,  176  n.,  274, 
363,  449  ff.,  482  n. 

Machiavelli,  N.,  18. 

Maine,  Sir  Henry,  219  n.,  333,  336. 

Maladaptation,  241  f . 

Manu,  335. 

Martyrdom,  437  ff. 

Meaning  (v.  Interpretation),  58, 
90,  145  f.,  188,  208,  284,  450, 
458  n. 

Mediaeval,  341  n.,  357  f. 

Metaphysics,  102,  123,  162  f.,  171, 
275,  343,  352,  382  f.,  424,  427, 
428,  438  f. 

Meyer,  M.,  53  n. 

Meyerson,  A.,  59  n. 

Mill,  J.  S.,  252. 

Mind  (v.  Self,  Will,  Personality). 

Momentum,  mental,  271. 

Montesquieu,  64. 

Morgan,  Lloyd,  71  n.,  114. 


Murray,  Gilbert,  183,  420. 

Mysticism,  27,  351,  411,  419,  428. 

Myth,  318. 

Naturalism,  51. 

Necessary  interests,  83,  83  n.,  143, 
167,  228,  235,  281. 

Negative  Pragmatism  (v.  Pragma¬ 
tism). 

Nietzsche,  Fr.,  24,  29  f.,  34  f.,  97, 
102,  414  n. 

Obligation,  Ought,  115,  479  ff. 

Originality,  159,  276. 

Pacifism,  157,  375  ff.,  379. 

Pain,  180  ff.,  201,  246. 

Parental  instinct,  34,  113,  253,  431, 
435. 

Parsons,  Elsie  Clews,  204  n. 

Passion,  59,  143  f.,  302,  344,  381. 

Patriotism,  233. 

Paulsen,  F.,  321  n. 

Peirce,  Charles,  107. 

Penology  (v.  Punishment),  esp.  ch. 
XXXII. 

Perry,  B.  B.,  83  n.,  86,  454  f.,  477. 

Personality,  102,  239,  275  f.,  335, 
339,  369. 

Pessimism,  19,  20,  241,  243. 

Philosophy,  9. 

Plato,  17,  42,  220  n.,  300,  388, 
409  n.,  414,  422. 

Play,  instinct  of,  16,  73,  73  n.,  95, 
179,  269,  315,  462. 

Pleasure,  81  f.,  146,  147  n.,  180  f., 
246,  470  f. 

Politics  (v.  State),  8,  13,  111,  154, 
214,  282. 

Postulates,  213,  227,  248,  252. 

Power  (v.  Will  to  power),  59,  123, 
229  ff.,  243. 


INDEX 


495 


Pragmatism,  161  f.,  300,  323  f., 
331,  337,  338,  365,  386,  428,  429, 
434. 

Progress,  436. 

Property  (v.  Economics,  Labor, 
Acquisition),  203,  237  n.,  238  f., 
247,  335. 

Prophetic  Consciousness  (v.  Will  to 
power),  328,  329,  344,  403. 

Protestantism,  402,  403. 

Prudence,  186. 

Psychoanalysis  (v.  Freud). 

Psychology  (in  relation  to  biology, 
v.  Consciousness,  Behavior),  9, 
41,  108,  111,  207,  380  f.,  410,  479. 

Ptah  Eotep,  326. 

Public  and  Private  Orders,  304  f. 

Pugnacity,  instinct  of  (v.  Anger), 
chs.  XXIV,  XXVIII,  XXXI, 
XXXII,  XLI,  and  also  pp.  64, 
66,  68,  72,  73,  80,  113,  119, 136  f., 
138,  143  ff.,  156  f.,  185,  285, 
389,  400,  430,  462,  463. 

Punishment,  ch.  XXXII,  p.  283, 
and  also  pp.  166  f.,  189,  201, 
280  f.,  333. 

Putnam,  J.  J.,  100  n. 

Quantity,  in  psychology,  7,  24,  239. 

Radicalism,  250. 

Realism  (moral),  219,  341. 

Reason  (v.  Cognition, Intelligence), 
32,  202. 

Rebellion,  ch.  XXXI,  p.  280,  and 
also  pp.  239,  265,  275,  279. 

Rebirth,  Regeneration  (v.  Conver¬ 
sion),  27,  319,  388. 

Recognition,  233. 

Recommenders  (v.  Authority), 
211  ff. 

Reverence,  482. 


Religion,  Parts  VI  and  VII,  and 
also  pp.  8,  12,  19,  27,  121,  167, 
278,  295,  2971,  315,  337,  354  n., 
393,  398,  414,  427. 

Repression,  25,  37,  98,  193. 

Revenge,  188  1,  286,  289  f. 

Reverence,  335. 

Rhythm,  83  1,  473. 

Right  (v.  Liberty,  Justice),  212, 
212  n.,  261,  283,  333,  480,  486. 

Rivers,  W.  H.  R.,  71  n. 

Romanticism,  28,  32. 

Boss,  E.  A.,  202,  481. 

Rousseau,  24,  29,  31  1,  49,  215  1, 
226. 

Royce,  J.,  224  n.,  401,  424. 

Rue,  Ruing,  159,  423. 

Russell,  Bertrand,  173,  257  n.,  260. 

Sacrifice,  438  f. 

Sacrilege,  334.  . 

Saintly  ideal  (v.  Asceticism),  20  1, 
353  ff. 

Salvation,  Saving,  297  1,  303,  397, 
404,  408,  418. 

Sanctions  (v.  Pain,  Punishment). 

Santayana,  G.,  27. 

Schneider,  G.  H.,  72,  76,  99,  458. 

Schopenhauer,  94,  247  n.,  312,  395, 
438. 

Self,  unity  of  (v.  Personality, 
Will),  37,  58,  59,  60,  89  ff., 
140  1,  178,  246,  267  ff.,  421,  475. 

Self-assertion  and  self-abasement, 
instincts  of  (v.  Ambition,  Fear), 
67,  89,  274,  366,  381,  430,  434, 
435,  480. 

Self-consciousness  (v.  Conscious¬ 
ness,  Conscience),  6  f.,  59,  116, 
122,  171,  215  f.,  218,  241,  246, 
253  f.,  321,  338,  340,  369. 

Self -elimination,  social  (v.  Indi¬ 
vidualism),  217,  278. 


INDEX 


496 

Self-preservation,  instinct  of  (v. 

Will  to  live),  84,  85,  89,  98  n. 
Self -regarding  sentiment,  116, 
143  n. 

Sensitivity,  245. 

Sex,  instinct  of  (v.  Love),  ch. 
XLII,  p.  379,  and  also  pp.  34, 
38,  66  f.,  71,  74,  96,  99  f.,  119, 

136  f.,  138,  207,  238,  272  f.,  276, 
289,  331,  345  f.,  348,  400. 

Shand,  A.  F.,  188. 

Shaw ,  Bernard,  277. 

Sin,  chs.  XVI  ff.,  Appendix  II,  p. 

479  ff.,  and  pp.  405,  423. 

Sin,  original,  ch.  XX,  p.  161,  and 
also  pp.  12  f.,  19,  127,  135  f., 

137  n.,  161,  287. 

Sociability,  instinct  of  (v.  Gre¬ 
gariousness),  42,  85,  94,  112, 
121,  153  f.,  267  n.,  369,  421. 
Social  contract  (v.  Contract). 
Socrates,  372,  410. 

Soul,  326. 

Sovereignty  (v.  Individualism, 
State),  235,  281  f. 

Spencer,  H.,  24,  119,  199  n.,  364. 
Spinoza,  44,  356  f. 

State,  the  (v.  Politics,  Right,  Law 
and  Legislation,  Public  Order), 
113,  232  ff.,  272,  283,  307,  308, 
347,  354  f.,  405,  435,  481. 
Stimulus,  58,  81,  84,  262,  270. 
Stoicism,  26. 

Sublimation,  36,  98. 

Substance,  301  f. 

Supernatural,  351. 

Synderesis,  486. 

Syndicalism,  239,  310  n. 

Szymanski,  J.  M.,  71  n.,  468. 

Tabu,  323,  331. 

Teleology,  424. 


Tenderness  (v.  Parental  instinct). 

Thorndike,  E.  L.,  69  n.,  77,  87,  103, 
113  n.,  114,  135,  177  n.,  182. 

Thought  (v.  Idea,  Cognition,  In¬ 
telligence). 

Tolstoy,  233,  373,  379. 

Toynbee,  A.,  310. 

Triadic  structure,  218,  220  n. 

Units  of  behavior,  68,  261,  266. 

Universal  and  particular,  175,  221, 
284. 

Urban,  W.,  45  n. 

Utility,  323  ff.,  383,  391. 

Value,  58,  60,  334,  432,  433,  435, 
437,  446,  474  f. 

Value,  theory  of,  44  f.,  63,  65, 
105  n.,  202  f.,  436. 

Veblen,  T.,  268. 

Vedantism,  356. 

Vestibule  of  satisfaction,  206. 

Vicariousness,  242. 

Waiting  capacity,  207,  242,  246, 
271. 

Wallas,  Graham,  89  n.,  301  n. 

War  in  general  (v.  Pacifism,  Pug¬ 
nacity),  241,  244,  375  ff.,  436. 

Watson,  J.,  178  n. 

Westermarck,  E.,  113  f. 

Whitman,  Walt,  126,  425. 

Will,  ch.  XI,  p.  88,  and  also  pp. 
140,  175,  258. 

Will  to  live  (v.  Self-preservation), 
84,  85,  95,  228. 

Will  to  power  (v.  Power,  Will), 
84,  94  f.,  113,  123,  139,  167,  269, 
333,  356,  3841,  413,  476. 

Wollaston,  147. 

Woodworth,  B.  S.,  471  f. 

Worship,  342,  392  f. 


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